Little White Lies Issue 97: January/February/March 2023

Released 27 JANUARY Nan Goldin leaves no moment uncaptured. Hers is a world as intense as it is varied, as possessive as it is forgiving. It unravels and gains its texture in dimly-lit homes and nightclubs, on messy motel beds, in spaces shaped by and for the people who exist in them. People enveloped in the haze of sex and drugs, of intimate and violent encounters, of relationships that give life and those that take it. Her seminal contributions to the world of art and activism make for the perfect documentary subject for a filmmaker of Laura Poitras’ calibre. “I survived the opioid crisis. I narrowly escaped.” Goldin narrates from her heartbreaking essay published in Artforum magazine in 2018, before going on to reveal an ongoing and tireless fight to expose…

The feted on-fiction flimmakers picks a part the intricacies of fashioning a portrait of a subject as formidable and complex as photographer Nan Goldin. Watching films all-day, every day at a film festival can mean they all blur into a carousel of images until – suddenly – one cuts through and you’re in a daze outside afterwards searching colleagues’ eyes for signs they are equally moved. So it was with All The Beauty and the Bloodshed, a portrait of the artist Nan Goldin by the documentarian Laura Poitras, which did move my colleagues, yes, and also Julianne Moore’s jury which awarded it the 2022 Venice Film Festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion. Poitras is no slouch when it comes to securing industry plaudits for her work, as she has under…

LWLies: How did you originally become involved in PAIN and connect with Nan Goldin? Kapler: A friend introduced me to Nan in 2018 when she was looking for help in her studio. She invited me to a PAIN meeting that week and I was immediately inspired by what I saw artists, activists, lawyers and others dreaming up elaborate protests to call out these billionaires and rewrite their reputation. I got started immediately. Having connected with her in PAIN, did Nan talk about or reference her background as a famous artist, as the film gives the impression that she is entirely focused on this as a completely separate chapter of her life. When PAIN started, Nan always said that PAIN was her work. And it was. She became fully dedicated to…

“The truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind,” wrote the poet Emily Dickinson. But then she did not live to see the work of Nan Goldin whose truth scorches like high-proof alcohol in your throat. A lifeforce, akin to warm skin touching warm skin, animates her photographic work, which came to the attention of the art world in 1986 with the slideshow and accompanying image compendium, ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’. Laura Poitras’ film portrait, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, contextualises the publication of this book as the organic fruit of a queer, countercultural lifestyle that proved Goldin’s salvation from the stifling conformity of her suburban upbringing. She says that the camera gave her the courage to move through the world in spite of the many fears…

The border control agent at the airport was bemused when I said I was just visiting Sweden for the day. “We're visiting a gallery,” myself and my travelling companion, Sophie Monks Kaufman, explained. The Moderna Museet in Stockholm is the current home of ‘This Will Not End Well,’ a crash course in Nan Goldin, and a rare chance to see her work exhibited in the artist’s preferred format: the slideshow. Set in a single large hall, the exhibition is described as a “village” – there are six small black tents, dark inside, save for the glow of the slide projector. Snippets of music composed by Mica Levi, or rock songs by the likes of Petula Clark, or a children’s choir singing Space Oddity, play over the images. The intimacy of…

To experience one of Nan Goldin’s slideshows is to acquire a glimpse into another world. These images, slowly oscillating to a variety of evocative tunes, are their own kind of cinema. Take The Other Side: it is a work that offers a mere 16 minute glimpse into the beauty of queer and trans performers, but feels like a lifetime of footage. The mood changes along with the images, while each song – be it Charles Aznavour’s ‘What Makes a Man a Man’ or Peggy Lee’s ‘Fever’ – helps craft a story that is in conversation with the other montages. “I’ve always said that if anyone would have taken as many pictures as me they could be considered a good photographer,” Nan Goldin noted in a 2020 interview for Aperture Magazine. “But…