Nan Goldin’s photos in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022)  

all the beauty and the bloodshed (2022)

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022).

Nan Goldin in "All the beauty and the bloodshed" (Laura Poitras, 2022)

I'm in NYC TONIGHT at a book tour event for The Bezzle! WORD Books is bringing me to Threes Brewing Greenpoint, for a book talk with Academy Award winning director Laura Poitras (CITIZENFOUR). Please come, tell your friends, and BRING your friends!

Nan Goldin has always been a documentarian. The new film “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” feels less like a biography than a natural extension of her life’s work, a kind of collaboration between director Laura Poitras and the famed photographer on a cinematic memoir. 

 The film’s structure forcefully posits multiple parallels between the world Goldin grew up in and the one she fights in today — between AIDS and the opioid crisis, between historical and contemporary neglect of the marginalized, between queer life then and now. 

Read the full review.

"Her rebellion was the starting point for my own."

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)

Director: Laura Poitras

Cinematography: Nan Goldin, Clare Carter, Robert Kolodny, Alexander W. Lewis, Laura Poitras, Sean Vegezzi & Thom Pavia

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2023)

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

directed by Laura Poitras, 2022

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed Laura Poitras USA, 2022 ★★★★★ Impactful, moving, devastating.

Seen in 2022:

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras), 2022

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from 𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘻𝘦𝘯𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘳 (2014)

dir. laura poitras

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All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras (2022)

new-to-me #545 - All The Beauty and the Bloodshed

NYC! My book tour is bringing me to Brooklyn TOMORROW (Mar 24), where I'll be appearing with Academy Award winner Laura Poitras!

Please come! Tell friends! Bring friends!

Recently seen: In Laura Poitras’ lacerating Oscar-nominated new documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), fierce 69-year-old photographer Nan Goldin - think of her as the Marianne Faithfull of modern art (or as Variety puts it, “the post-punk Diane Arbus”) - emerges as a captivatingly blunt tough cookie. The film deftly weaves together her art, activism and history of personal trauma and Poitras wisely mainly lets Goldin narrate it herself in her broken chain-smoker rasp. 

The focus encompasses early family tragedy (the story of her doomed older sister Barbara is wrenching), Goldin’s artistic epiphany photographing her LGBTQ friends and her early years hustling in grungy 1980s New York (she go-go danced in New Jersey “titty bars”, bartended and did sex work at a brothel to buy rolls of film). Goldin eventually achieves international acclaim but also weathers the AIDS crisis, violent relationships and drug addiction. 

While Goldin has openly battled substance abuse over the decades (she frequently depicts herself in rehab in her self-portraits), nothing prepared her for the hell of OxyContin, which she was prescribed following an injury. Once Goldin recovered, she was enraged to learn the very galleries that display her work benefited from the support of the Sacklers – the mega-rich family behind Purdue Pharma whose wealth is tainted by the OxyContin-fueled opioid crisis and who position themselves as art world philanthropists as a means of image-laundering. Forming the activist group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) in 2018, Goldin undertook powerful demonstrations to shame the world’s cultural institutions into cutting ties with the Sackler family. (Goldin witnessed Act Up protests in the 80s and clearly took notes). Bittersweet as All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is (and the Sacklers retreat into their wealth rather than face any real consequences), it’s gratifying to see galleries finally start refusing the family’s money. There are vivid glimpses of totemic avant-garde downtown NYC denizens like Cookie Mueller, David Wojnarowicz, Greer Lankton and Vivienne Dick. And as you would anticipate, the soundtrack is hip (Klaus Nomi. Bush Tetras. The Velvet Underground. Suicide). Pictured: Self Portrait 1st Time on Oxy, Berlin, 2014 by Nan Goldin