Nan Goldin (born 1953) lives and works between New York, Paris and Berlin. Given her first camera at the age of 15, she began taking Polaroids of herself and her friends at a hippie commune. In 1972 she moved in with a group of drag queens in Boston, starting her lifelong obsession with photographing queer and transgender communities. In 1978 Goldin moved to New York City, where she presented slideshows in nightclubs and underground cinemas; her best known, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, was published as a landmark book in 1986. In the 1990s, Goldin relocated to Berlin where she published A Double Life with David Armstrong and the first edition of The Other Side. In 2018 Goldin and her colleagues founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), a direct-action group advocating harm reduction and education to address the stigma of addiction and the mounting overdose crisis.
