Most renowned for her gritty and raw images of friends and hangers on taking part in intimate, illicit and sometimes illegal activities, in the Variety series Goldin documented on-set images of Bette Gordon’s now-infamous 1983 independent film Variety. The photographs blur the line between reality and fiction and further emphasise the connection and empathy Goldin frequently has with her subjects. Revealing a previously unexamined but important aspect of Goldin’s career, this series also captures the unique atmosphere of the film, emblematic of the cinematic art that surfaced from the creative community on New York’s Lower East Side at the beginning of the 1980s.



Goldin’s exploration of human experience is legendary and has profoundly influenced subsequent generations. Her first work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1980-86), a slideshow accompanied by music, documents life in Provincetown, New York, Berlin and London beginning in the 1970s and 80s. Titled after a song in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, Goldin’s Ballad is a kind of downtown opera; its protagonists—including herself—are captured in intimate moments of love and loss. She photographed the world of her inner circle of creative, bohemian friends with raw tenderness.

Goldin’s work stands as a document of the generation whose experiences were defined by the freedom of life before AIDS and an alternative world outside normative society. Around 1980 Goldin began presenting her slideshows in various clubs and public venues in New York, at underground cinemas and film festivals in Europe, as well as Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She updated and re-edited her slideshow every time and used multiple projectors, which she operated against the background of an eclectic soundtrack. Goldin’s ability to revisit these slideshows has since formed the core of her artistic practice. Over the past 40 years she has produced a dozen different slideshows – from portraits of her friends to accounts of traumatic family events. Since then, she has added elements into her works such as moving images, voices and archival materials.

Born in Washington, DC, in 1953, Goldin grew up in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts. When she was eleven, her older sister committed suicide and the tragedy had a profound impact on the artist. When she was introduced to photography at the age of fifteen, she immediately began to use the medium both to document herself and those closest to her, and begin to explore social issues that were too often ignored, such as the HIV crisis in the 1980s and the more recent opioid epidemic. Despite the sensitive, intimate nature of her work, Goldin has always maintained a level of respect for her subjects, such as the gay and transgender communities she often documented; her aim has always been to bring these underrepresented communities to light, not illustrate them as spectacles

Goldin divides her time between the US and Europe. Her works are held, and continue to be acquired, by major public institutions worldwide, including Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.