“I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.”
—Nan Goldin

Eager to record everyday moments through her camera lens, Nan Goldin created a visual diary of her and her friends experiencing love, sex, abuse, addiction, pain, joy, and illness. Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Goldin lived and traveled a bohemian life in and out of Boston, New York, Provincetown, Berlin, Mexico City, London, and elsewhere.

The photographs’ saturated color and snapshot quality makes them feel at once intimate and truthful yet also romantic, sometimes even otherworldly. But the people and their stories are unstaged and fraught with contradiction. Cookie Mueller is shown seemingly alone at a bar, at her wedding to Vittorio Scarpati, and with her son, Max. She sold cocaine and used heroin, opium, and other drugs; she was a wife, a mother, an actress, a writer, bisexual. Cookie and Vittorio would both die in 1989 from AIDS-related causes. Greer Lankton died of a drug overdose in 1996. Nan survived; so did Suzanne. These words, like the photographs, are mere glimpses.

From the exhibition: Beauty and Bite (July 20, 2019 – January 19, 2020)