Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin was born in Washington DC in 1953 and grew up in the suburbs of Boston; the suicide of her older sister when Goldin was eleven is the event she has said the work begins from. She started photographing as a teenager, studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and moved to New York in 1978, where The Ballad of Sexual Dependency — hundreds of colour slides of her circle set to a soundtrack — was first shown in clubs and bars before its publication as a book in 1986. Through the AIDS years she photographed friends as they died, and in 1989 organised the exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. In 2017, after her own addiction to opioids, she founded P.A.I.N. to campaign against the Sackler family's museum philanthropy.

Most of what comes to market is editioned colour photography — silver dye bleach and chromogenic prints, often in small editions and sometimes as grids of several images presented as a single work — alongside the slide shows themselves, which are editioned as installations with their soundtrack and projection specification. Edition number, size and date of printing identify a print, and some images were printed at different times and scales as separate editions. Colour prints of the 1980s and 1990s are sensitive to light, and fading or colour shift is the usual condition issue. Signature, title, date and edition normally appear on the verso or a label, and her galleries hold the edition records.