NEW YORK – It’s not always overemphasized as one of the most recent photographers of the 50-year-old, but Nan Goldin is a cinephile. Enormous. Watching Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” (“Blow-Up. The Desire of a Summer Morning”), when she turned 15, Goldin wanted to be a photographer in the first place.
That “Ballad of Sexual Dependence” signature of his work includes a collection of some 700 images of the life of Goldin, friends and lovers in early 1980s New York City, as a film that continues to be re-edited and re-edited.
He has long dreamed of making a movie, and he still has it. “It’s still my obsession,” says Goldin, sitting at a restaurant table in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, on a rainy recent afternoon. “I’m a movie day, Northman. I see what’s in tcm.”
So perhaps it’s not surprising, after all, that Goldin, whose life and career were mentioned in Laura Poitras’ Oscar-nominated documentary “All Beauty and Blood,” was stunned, even horrified, at the Academy Awards. She criticized Barbara Stanwyck, Judy Holliday, and Martine Dietrich. “I really want an Oscar,” said Goldin, smiling.
“I didn’t expect it, but I want it.” “All Beauty and Blood,” now in theaters and on video demand, is far different from the traditional biopic.
She recounts Goldin’s life as a gritty and radical New York intimate photographer, and his demonstrations with the Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN) group for prescription drug addiction, while lobbying world museums to pull his name from the lobby.
The Sugar family owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin (oxycodone), an opioid drug linked to countless cases of addiction.
The film is a rich and provocative fusion of art and activism. Poitras, who best documents Edward Snowden’s 2014 film “Citizen,” intersperses Goldin’s intimate exchanges about life and work with footage of Goldin leading dramatic protests at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and elsewhere.
Poitras, who joined Goldin for the conference in Fort Greene, wanted to capture the film’s historical journey, from the sexual repression of the 1950s to Goldin’s depictions of queer life in the 1970s and 1980s, the support of crisis and transformation in Goldin’s current. activist PAIN demonstrations in Sackler’s name blackened from most museums, including the Louvre and the Tate Modern.
“It speaks to both the power of the artist in society and the power of the artist to share the moral blame for the government’s failure,” says Poitras. “I wanted this to be epic.” “All Beauty and Blood”, which won the prestigious Golden Lion at the Blues Festival, Goldin, one of the most prominent creators of images of many things Hollywood tends to avoid such as complex sexuality., LGBT+ lives and. the whole thing, at the glitzy epicenter of the Oscar industry on March 12.
“I don’t think there are too many movies that are as raw as my work. But I don’t think against my integrity I love Hollywood,” said Goldin. “I was already here when there were no movie people complaining. So they try. But they are rich, and they never trust the rich.
Watching “All the beauty and blood,” says Goldin, “is a cruel use.” He is responsible for the house, and he accepts it. But his life condensed into two hours is difficult for him.
Still, Goldin, 69, enjoys a lot about the trip. It is gratifying to him to see the younger generations respond to his work. “I like the question and answer sessions,” says Goldin.
“I like to wake people up.” The opioid crisis has been linked to more than 500,000 deaths in the United States since 1999. Goldin was almost one of them. While living in Berlin in 2014, Goldin overdosed on the opioid fentanyl.
After wrist surgery, she became addicted to OxyContin for several years. But he doesn’t see his energy in personal terms. “OxyContin has nothing to do with me, or very little. It’s about the overdose crisis,” he said. “The group was never anti-opioid. It was anti-drugs.
Purdue Pharma and three executives pleaded guilty in 2007 and agreed to pay more than $600 million for misleading the public about the dangers of OxyContin. The lawsuits continue. Both Goldin and Poitras entered the Justice Department case as individual criminal charges against executives at Sacklers and Purdue Pharma.
In 2020, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to OxyContin itself. Five years after Goldin led protesters to throw prescription drug bottles into the pit at the Met’s Temple of Dendur, the museum recently hosted a screening of “All Beaty and Blood.”
“I am proud of these museums. But there are still problems,” said Goldin. “It’s only scratched the surface. Your money isn’t exactly ethical either. Like that. Where is the ethics of the billionaires?”
But the experience in many ways left Goldin with a more equable mind about what kind of change is possible and whether people are willing to fight for it. The night before, Goldin had an event with Bernie Sanders and Cornel West.
“The kids are close to Brooklyn,” he said of the show’s audience. “But they are clapping violently, but I do not know what they are doing. Everyone has to go out in their own way because otherwise nothing can change.”
Documenting history, whether personal experience or political reality, Poitras and Goldin have something in common, though often very different. Poitras fearlessly chronicles government surveillance and whistleblowers revealing public secrets.
“These images have a way of reminding us of our history, what people suffered, what happened,” adds Poitras. Back in Goldin’s study, where pictures of old friends hang, many of them are now dead.
“They are all there,” he said. “I live every day.” In those days, Goldin and Poitras had been nominated at the annual Academy Awards and Bafta luncheons in London. Goldin has made some new friends around the world. I became a friend of Paul Mescal. I went out with him in London. We went to see Caravaggio together,” said Goldin, smiling.
“I really like him.” “Government should be transparent to the population and have its own privacy, and yet we have the opposite,” says Poitras. “This is rejection and anger against social stigmas and lies, the lies of society and the lies of the family.” After a long hiatus, Goldin begins to use his camera again. He took the Baftas trip with him to London.
But what draws attention is not similar. “He just started again. But I don’t photograph people. I photograph places,” said Goldin. “He just lost his attitude.” I usually do what I do compulsively. And I had a lot of photos all those years. I don’t have to push you anymore. But there are ambitions, or old ambitions flared up, with Goldin. He wants to make a film, he says, and has a book adaptation in mind.
“It’s about the worldliness of violence, how indescribable it is,” he said. “Until I turned 65, I was immortal. Now I’m mortal,” said Goldin. So I don’t have much time. That’s when you reach a certain age. The brilliance of mortality shines. So I don’t want to waste it now.”
