All The Beauty And The Bloodshed

Nan Goldin

There is a lot to unpack in Nan Goldin’s film, All The Beauty And The Bloodshed , which you can currently find over on BBC iPlayer. It acts as both a retrospective of Goldin’s career as an artist, and a document of her activism against the Sackler family, responsible for making and supplying Oxycontin through their pharmaceutical companies. Having read Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, which details the Sackler’s involvement in the opioid epidemic, I had some notion of what Goldin’s work had achieved, but gripping though the book was, nothing prepared me for how much this film would move me.

The film hops back and forth in time, showing Goldin’s work with P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) which she founded to attempt to bring the Sackler’s to justice and provide non-punitive help and healthcare for addicts, alongside her reminiscences about her life and work.

At the heart of Goldin’s work is the loss of her older sister, Barbara to suicide when Goldin was eleven-years-old. Goldin only briefly touches on the toxicity of their home life yet manages to say so much in a few, quiet lines. What I found almost unbearable was Goldin talking about the bond she had with her sister by describing how her sister would wash her hair, because that’s what she ‘needed’. In that almost throwaway sentence we see the consequences of the lack of human touch, the neglect and the absence of any sort of parenting in both their lives. It aches with love and loneliness.

Goldin describes how their mother demanded that Barbara speak in full sentences from the time she was one. Barbara responded by not speaking at all for several years. When she did find her voice and later her queer sexuality, Barbara was sent away, first to an orphanage and then to a series of mental hospitals before finally killing herself. The only agency left in her life was her decision to end it.

Barbara was not allowed to tell her story. The only bits of Barbara that exist are in a handful of photographs, the records of her hospital treatment and the memories of her sister. When Barbara died, Goldin also became virtually mute and was also sent away from home. One of the few things that Goldin talks about in relation to her childhood was remembering her mother begging them not to tell anyone what was going on. The one constant running through Goldin’s memories was the lack of a voice to talk about them with.

Goldin found her voice in and had her life saved by photography. It not only gave her a reason to exist, it gave her a way of documenting the lives of people, herself included, who otherwise had no agency and no voice. She couldn’t save her sister but she might save people like her. She photographs the life she chose when she was removed from the life she was born into. Photography speaks for her, but most powerfully for Goldin, it also has no voice that can be taken away. The images she makes are what holds her message and her power.

She prefaces the showing of grouped, narrative slides of her work by saying,‘It’s easy to make your life into a story,’ but talks about the photographs being a cleaned up version of the memories, which are far dirtier and more complicated. The memories are, she says, ‘in your body.’

This leads me to wonder if what compels Goldin to click the shutter is an embodied memory that physically demands the documentary process, like a compulsive tic. The majority of Goldin’s photographs are centred on portraiture and the body, and many of them are what we might think of as filthy, in all senses of the word. Her photographic space is intimate and seemingly confessional. You fall into the images as if you, the viewer were standing just outside the shot at the time it was taken. You are invited into a world where reality plays out across the raw angles of bodies in motion. She depicts drag queens and transvestites, queer love, addicts and addiction, illness and death, physical violence and abuse and every kind of bodily expression. The photographs capture moments being created by bodies and moments inhabiting bodies.

The focus pulls us into the lives being lived. Goldin photographs people on the margins but puts them in the centre. We, as the viewers are now in the position once inhabited by the photographs’ subjects. We are on the outside looking in. In these lives it is we that are excluded, whereas, for so many of her subjects, their daily lives are constant acts of navigation through and around boundaries that ‘normal’ people don’t see or feel. Now though, we are confronted by the forbidden, by that which makes us the ‘other’. It is part of the power of the pictures that they show us how easy it is to find ourselves on the edges of life. Goldin’s work repeatedly flips the accepted narrative and shows us how much of what we think of as real is an illusion brought about by where we stand in the picture. Looking at Goldin’s work forces us to confront information that we might otherwise prefer to look away from.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a slide show with accompanying music, sees Goldin using the same title for a work in which she frequently changed the photographs she used and the music, depending on the audience she was showing it to. It points to the eternality of certain story-telling tropes regardless of which humans are enacting them. It takes a narrative that we think we understand and shows its capacity for change in the breadth of humanity it can hold if we are only prepared to take off the blinkers of what is socially acceptable for a moment.

Whilst depicting what is ‘real’, the photographs also ask questions about truth. The intimacy and reality of the images come into question depending on when and where you see them. If you look at images in a gallery, no matter how candid and raw they seem, they are still undeniably art, curated and framed. These images are staged, even if only momentarily by Goldin’s eye and her choice to photograph this moment but not this. This is only a fragment of a story made to stand in for the whole. The images are there to be seen by people other than Goldin and her subjects. They hold Goldin’s truth, but as she says in relation to her photographs of domestic violence, they may also speak to others who have experienced similar things. They offer communion. They bear witness, but what they bear witness to is subject to change.

She acknowledges that there isn’t always going to be one truth, in fact, almost never. What is important is that you find a way to live your truth. A life lived authentically is the only way to live, but is a life lived if it isn’t captured somewhere? A memory fades, but art endures.

This takes us back to the difference Goldin talks about between photographs and the memory. The photographs can be elevated into art, the memory and the physical body, not so much. I think Goldin’s practice is an attempt to marry image and memory, creating a circuit between the two that constantly fires one against the other. The life creates the art creates the life, and the life elevated to art lives forever.

It is this which is at the heart of her activism, which started far earlier than her work with P.A.I.N. when she was moved to document the community she loved being destroyed by AIDS and the lack of help from a government that didn’t care. This work and the work of ACT UP in the form of protests and die ins, directly informs the stance she decided to take against the Sackler family.

Goldin’s work focussed on leveraging her now elevated status as an artist of note who had finally been accepted into the art world. She spent four years creating campaigns to force museums and art galleries who had taken Sackler money and legitimised the family’s philanthropy to acknowledge the human cost of those donations and refuse to help whitewash their reputation any longer. As an insider, Goldin finally had a voice, and she used it. The protest against the Sacklers was loud and public and it worked. Museum after museum started to refuse donations and remove the Sackler name from its collections.

What is interesting but not unexpected is that Goldin did not use her hard won credibility to protect herself. She used it in a way that could have spectacularly backfired and so easily have cost her her career. She used her position to open the door to others, something she had been doing with her photography all her life. The Sacklers used their name to cover up what was dirty. Goldin used hers to uncover it. She exposes the lie and makes the truth a place where we can all live.

At the end of the documentary she says:

‘The wrong things are kept secret, and that destroys people.’

It’s people like Goldin who bring them back.