Nan Goldin (born September 12, 1953) is an American fine-art and documentary photographer.
Goldin was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in an upper middle class Jewish family in the Boston suburb of Lexington, Massachusetts. After attending Lexington High School, she attended the Satya Community School in Boston, where a teacher introduced her to the camera in 1968, when she was fifteen years old. Her first solo show was in Boston in 1973, based on her photography among the city's gay and transsexual communities, to which she had been introduced by her friend David Armstrong. She graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University in 1977/8, where she had worked mostly with Cibachrome prints.
After graduation, she moved to New York City and began documentary photography of the post-punk new-wave music scene, and the city's vibrant gay subculture in the late 1970's and early 1980's, gradually being drawn in to the Bowery's hard drug subculture. These photographs, taken from 1979 to 1986, form her famous work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency — a title taken from a song in Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera.[citation needed] The snapshot aesthetic images depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. Most of her Ballad subjects were dead by the 1990s due to either drug overdoses or AIDS, including close friends and often photographed subjects, Greer Lankton and Cookie Mueller. In addition to Ballad, she combined her pictures in two other series I'll Be Your Mirror (from a song on The Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico) and All By Myself.
