Taipei Travel

Born in 1953 to a Jewish family in Washington, D.C., USA, Goldin left home at the age of 14 after being traumatized by her sister;s suicide. She was introduced to photography in 1968 when she was given her first Polaroid camera while attending the Satya Community School in Boston, and David Armstrong was her first subject at the time. From the early 1970s, Goldin took a series of black-and-white photographs of Boston;s transgender communities, which led to her first solo exhibition in 1973. After graduating from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston, she moved to New York City where she continued documenting her friends, as well as the citys diverse landscape and culture. Goldin’s work went against the grain of the academic photography of the time, documenting the realities of the East Village of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, ranging from drag queens, same-sex and heterosexual couples in love or troubled relationships, drug addiction and sexuality, as well as the private lives of individuals.

Nan Goldin has had solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Her work has been featured in major retrospective exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in 1996, and the Centre Pompidou in 2001, as well as in major biennials such as the Berlinale, the São Paulo Art Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. Goldin has received numerous awards such as the ArtReview Power 100, Time Magazines 100 Most Influential People, the Käthe Kollwitz Prize, the Hasselblad Award, the French Order of Arts and Letters, and the Teddy Award at the Berlinale. In 2022, the biographical documentary film “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”, directed by Laura Poitras, chronicles Goldins life and work and follows her activist group P.A.I.N. in their fight against the Sackler family, demonstrating the power of art to make a difference in the world.