Laura Poitras
(Picture: Jan Stürmann)The documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras typically zones in on what she calls “individuals who are confronting abuses of power, particularly in the context of the United States” – such as Julian Assange, or Edward Snowden, the subject of her Oscar-winning film Citizenfour. Her new work, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, documenting what some might consider a mere photographer of subcultures, could be seen as a lightweight shift in direction. But even notwithstanding that the film has already won a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and is now in line for an Oscar, that would be to underestimate her latest subject, Nan Goldin, as both an artist and, particularly in the last decade or so, an activist.
Goldin, 69, is one of the great game-changers. Her seminal book and slideshow (her preferred form), The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, was like a lightning strike when it was first shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1985. Unlike her predecessor Diane Arbus, with whom she is sometimes lumped in (which doesn’t much please her), Goldin’s way of chronicling New York life was to turn her camera on her own life, pointing her unflinching lens at the drag artists, club kids, drug addicts and hustlers who made up her group of friends to show them partying, fighting, breaking up, dreaming, bonding with their children, taking drugs and having sex in the late Seventies and early Eighties.
