Nan Goldin

The third volume of the Lambert Collection Icons series is dedicated to Nan Goldin (born 1953), very much an icon of her generation, whose work is prominent in Yvon Lambert’s Collection, which contains more than 100 works of the photographer’s deeply, personal candid portraiture.

The photographer and collector were personal friends, enjoying a passionate relationship marked by periods of estrangement and intense reunions.

More than 80 of the artist’s portraits are included here—snapshots of people meeting, laughing, embracing, entwining, loving, suffering, crying, dying and living as intensely as possible.

One of Time Magazine's best photo book of 2019

This is an expanded and updated version of Nan Goldin’s seminal book The Other Side, originally published in 1993, featuring a revised introduction by Goldin, and, for the first time, the voices of those whose stories are represented. Published at a time when discourse around gender and sexual orientation is evolving rapidly, The Other Side traces some of the history that informs this new visibility.

The first photographs in the book are from the 1970s, when Goldin lived in Boston with a group of drag queens and documented their glamour and vulnerability. In the early 1980s, Goldin chronicled the lives of transgender friends in New York when AIDS began to decimate her community. In the ’90s, she recorded the explosion of drag as a social phenomenon in New York, Berlin, Bangkok and the Philippines. Goldin’s newest photographs are intimate portraits, imbued with tenderness, of some of her most beloved friends. The Other Side is her homage to the queens she has loved, many of whom she has lost, over the last four decades.

Nan Goldin (born 1953) lives and works between New York, Paris and Berlin. In 1978 Goldin moved to New York, where she presented slideshows in nightclubs and underground cinemas; her best known, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, was published in 1986. In the ’90s Goldin relocated to Berlin where she published A Double Life with David Armstrong and the first edition of The Other Side. In 2000 she moved to Paris. In 2018 Goldin and her colleagues founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), a direct action group advocating for addiction treatment and education in the mounting opioid crisis. Her publications with Steidl include The Beautiful Smile (2008) and Diving for Pearls (2016).

The Beautiful Smile, unavailable since its original publication on the occasion of Nan Goldin’s (born 1953) Hasselblad Award of 2007, is finally back in print. The Hasselblad Award is considered the most important international photography prize in the world today; since 1980, award winners have included some of the greatest names the medium has known.

2007 winner Nan Goldin is easily one of the most significant photographers of our time. Adopting the direct aesthetics of snapshot photography, she has documented her own life and that of her friends and others on the margins of society for more than 30 years, offering frank depictions of drug abuse, cross-dressing and alternative sexualities. Her intimate photographs depict urban lives in New York and Europe in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, a period massively determined by HIV and AIDS. Her practice of photography as memoir, as a means of protection against loss and as an act of preservation, as well as her use of the slide show, resonates in the work of photographers of recent generations.

This classic volume, which the photographer has called her favorite of all of her books, is a moving homage to the work of one of the most eminent artists of our time.