Nan Goldin valuation
Photographed her friends, lovers and herself through love, drugs, violence and AIDS, and called it a diary.
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.
What a work by Nan Goldin is worth
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Bio
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.
Boston, the Bowery and the Hasselblad Award
Goldin left home at thirteen, and at sixteen went to the Satya Community School in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where she began photographing with a donated Polaroid camera. Her first solo show, in Boston in 1973, came from her photographs of the city's gay and transgender communities, to which her friend David Armstrong had introduced her. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency draws on pictures of her Bowery circle taken between 1979 and 1986.
Chasing a Ghost, in New York in 2006, was her first installation with moving pictures and a narrative score, and included Sisters, Saints and Sybils. She received the Hasselblad Award in 2007. Tate owns one of the ten copies of The Ballad, and her work is also in the Centre Pompidou.
The Mudd Club, Witnesses and This Will Not End Well
Her first New York slide show was at Frank Zappa's birthday party at the Mudd Club, and The Ballad of Sexual Dependency grew to about 700 images over some 45 minutes, set to songs from the Velvet Underground to Maria Callas and named after a song in Brecht's Threepenny Opera. It was screened at the Whitney Biennial in 1985 and published by Aperture the next year with 125 pictures, with Nan One Month After Being Battered, of 1984, at its centre. Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing opened at Artists Space in 1989, six days after the death of her friend Cookie Mueller.
The Whitney gave her a retrospective, I'll Be Your Mirror, in 1996, and Le Feu Follet went from the Centre Pompidou to the Whitechapel Gallery in 2001. MoMA showed the Ballad again in 2016 and 2017, she won the Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2022, and This Will Not End Well, a survey of the slide shows and films, opened at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2023 and travelled to Amsterdam, Berlin and the Grand Palais in Paris in 2026.
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