Nan Goldin’s photography is a lesson in capturing life; its raw brutality and beautiful banality. Best known for her celebrated slideshows, Goldin’s work documents humanity as a spectrum in which little is off limits. Recently, she has used her influence in art to confront power and accountability in the US opioid crisis
Addiction is a complex beast. It can masquerade as cure, ally or pleasure, but often results in pain. Artist Nan Goldin knows about addiction; she’s been inside it, witnessed it, and documented its many facets. She has also confronted its pain, those who have profited from that pain, and used her platform as a force for reckoning.
Goldin first took Oxycontin (a strong opioid-based painkiller) in 2014 for tendonitis in her wrist. She had struggled with heroin addiction in the 1980s and got sober; this was different, she was hooked overnight. ‘It was the cleanest drug I’d ever met,’ she said in a now-landmark 2018 essay for , explaining how her life revolved around
