Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well

A sumptuous trove of photographs, stills and more from Goldin's innovative work in film

This is the first book to present a comprehensive overview of Nan Goldin's work as a filmmaker. Accompanying the retrospective show and tour of the same name, organized by Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the book draws from the nearly dozen slideshows and films Goldin has made from thousands of photographs, film sequences, audio tapes and music tracks. The stories told range from the trauma of her family history to the portrayal of her bohemian friends to a journey into the darkness of addiction.

By focusing exclusively on slideshows and video installations, This Will Not End Well aims to fully embrace Goldin's vision of how her work should be experienced. The book retains the presentation of the slide shows by showing all images in the same format on a black background and sequenced as they are in the sources. The 20 texts, the majority of which are newly commissioned by Goldin, complement and deepen the intention of her work.

Nan Goldin (born 1953) lives and works between New York, Paris and Berlin. Given her first camera at the age of 15, she began taking Polaroids of herself and her friends at a hippie commune. In 1972 she moved in with a group of drag queens in Boston, starting her lifelong obsession with photographing queer and transgender communities. In 1978 Goldin moved to New York City, where she presented slideshows in nightclubs and underground cinemas; her best known, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, was published as a landmark book in 1986. In the 1990s, Goldin relocated to Berlin where she published A Double Life with David Armstrong and the first edition of The Other Side. In 2018 Goldin and her colleagues founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), a direct-action group advocating harm reduction and education to address the stigma of addiction and the mounting overdose crisis.