Nan Goldin

Matthew Marks is pleased to present Nan Goldin: 1972–1977. The exhibition features seventeen rarely seen photographs made between 1972 and 1977.

Goldin grew up outside Boston. She left home when she was fourteen and started taking photographs the following year. When she was nineteen she moved in with a group of drag queens in Boston. Goldin photographed her new friends, both at home and at what was then Boston’s most popular drag bar, The Other Side, which hosted beauty pagents every Monday night. Goldin’s distinctive style of candid, informal photography is fully recognizable in these early images.

Goldin’s earliest photographs were in black and white. Her first color photographs were made in 1973 and for the next several years she worked in both mediums. In 1978, after graduating from Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts, she moved to New York and began working exclusively in color.

Nan Goldin was born in Washington, D.C. and lives and works in New York. Her work has been the subject of two touring museum retrospectives, one organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art (1996) and the other by the Centre Georges Pompidou (2001). An exhibition of her work is scheduled to open at The National Portrait Gallery in London next year.