Most of us came to know American photographer and activist Nan Goldin's work through The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, the raw, unflinching 1986 record of her downtown New York circle: the addiction, the violence, the beauty, the loss. Less well known, though, is what made her. Sisters, Saints and Sibyls began not in a Manhattan loft but in a Maryland suburb in 1965, with a teenage girl lying down in front of a train.
That girl was Barbara Holly Goldin, Nan's older sister. Born in 1946, Barbara was a precocious, spirited child who, by her early teens, was being institutionalized, pathologized and controlled by a system (medical, familial, social) that had no language for a girl who simply refused to comply.
