In 1985 The Ballad slideshow was selected for inclusion in the Whitney Biennial. She edited and re-edited her slideshows constantly, and as she kept showing revised versions at bars, nightclubs, and art spaces, her audience grew. Goldin had started making slideshows to share her pictures with the friends who were her subjects (and who sometimes had playful competitions to see who appeared in the most pictures). Goldin’s most famous photographic series, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1979–1986) began not as a book but as a 45-minute slideshow with more than 700 images and a backing soundtrack by the likes of the Velvet Underground, James Brown, Nina Simone, and Charles Aznavour.

It was this that drove her to constantly photograph members of what she called her tribe. Goldin had found her “extended family.” With her sister still at the forefront of her mind, she “became obsessed with never losing the memory of anyone again,” she said in I’ll Be Your Mirror. The following year she and Armstrong enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (as did Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Mark Morrisroe, who would go on to successful careers of their own) after graduating she moved with a group of friends first to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and then to New York. Goldin had her first solo show in 1973 at Project, Inc. She wanted to be a fashion photographer and dreamed of putting the queens on the cover of Vogue.

They moved together into a row house in Boston with four other roommates, and as Armstrong started performing in drag, Goldin became enamored of the drag queens and their lives, seeing them as a “third gender that made more sense that the other two,” as she explained in her 1995 documentary, I’ll Be Your Mirror. At school she met David Armstrong, the first person she photographed and the one who started calling her Nan. She discovered photography while living in foster homes in the Boston area. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.Īt 14, afraid she would suffer the same fate as her sister, Goldin ran away from home.

Nan goldin clemens schick