Nan Goldin was working as a go-go dancer in New York in the late Seventies when she realised – thanks to the proprietor of Tin Pan Alley bar, Maggie Smith, who pointed it out – that she was a political artist.
Her most famous bodies of work date from that period; unflinching but loving chronicles of the lives of Boston drag queens and New York’s post-Stonewall queer scene, of drug use and violence in the city’s subcultural underbelly, that explore universal themes of love and sex, domesticity and dependency, pain and performance through the friends in her circle, so often considered outsiders by wider society.
