New & now: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Laura Poitras directs a moving documentary about photographer/activist Nan Goldin.
My grandmother was an inveterate photographer. She collected cameras, nothing too fancy, but she owned Instamatic cameras, Ektralites, the short-lived Disc, and others that came and went. When disposable cameras became a thing, she always carried one in her purse. She took thousands of photographs over her lifetime, and wouldn’t even get rid of the duds, the pictures that featured an errant camera strap in front of the lens, or worse, depicted someone eating or making some sort of goofy face they wouldn’t remember making later. I don’t think it really mattered to her that her pictures were good, in an artistic sense, just that she took them, and that she captured whatever had drawn her eye.
To casual outsiders, my grandmother’s life wasn’t very exciting. She and my grandfather, over a nearly fifty-year-long marriage, only went on vacation four times, and one of them was just a trip to visit family in upstate New York, hardly Paris in the springtime. They didn’t go out much, and rarely treated their hometown Atlantic City for the beachside resort town it once was. But she took pictures anyway, of the flowers she grew, her belongings, her pets, her family. Everything seemed worth documenting. I used to be like that too, always snapping photographs, even getting in them myself sometimes. Then, sometime in the past two decades or so, I stopped. Part of it was, frankly, self-consciousness about my appearance: my “cute years” swiftly came to an end, and I found myself far less comfortable in front of a camera than I used to be, whether I was holding it or not. Also, in a strange way, despite all of us having cameras with us at all times, and social media encouraging us to share every aspect of our lives, there’s a sense that nothing we show each other is really “real.” Vacation photos are choreographed (if not faked completely), and even “casual” selfies involve just the right lighting and even outfit changes. I am old, and my life isn’t very interesting, and it frankly sounds a little exhausting.
Nan Goldin’s photographs are shocking both in their “realness,” and in their intimacy. She too took pictures of everything, and I mean everything, including her friends taking a quick pee in a nightclub bathroom, and herself having sex with a partner, evidently relying on a timer to take the shot. The lighting in many of the photos is either too dim, or too bright. Everyone is sweaty, and rumpled, no one looks like they’ve had a decent sleep in days. In one of Goldin’s most well-known self-portraits, taken after a terrible beating by a lover, her face is swollen, and one of her eyes is shot red with blood. Rather than sad or angry, however, she just looks impassive, as if thinking this happened, now I have to document it.
Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed takes a three-prong approach to the story of Goldin’s life, focusing on her family (predominantly the suicide of her older sister Barbara at just 18), her role in the downtown New York City art scene of the 70s and 80s before it was decimated by AIDS and drug addiction, and her work in recent years with organizations dedicated to removing the Sackler Family name from art museums both in the United States and around the world. If you’re unfamiliar with the Sackler Family, they’re billionaires who made much of their fortune through OxyContin, a prescription painkiller that’s as addictive as heroin, and has led to nearly a million overdose deaths since 1999. Presumably for the tax write-offs, the Sacklers have donated enough money to get their names on entire wings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and the Louvre, among many others. Despite years of sanctions and fines, OxyContin is still being manufactured, and the Sacklers are still rich beyond comprehension, and the best we can hope for is that there will be a Sackler Wing in Hell.
The story of Goldin’s rise to fame as a visual artist is at least as much about finding community as it is about raw talent and ambition. Her subjects were mostly her friends, particularly writer and actress Cookie Mueller1, and her initial audience was also mostly her friends, who either cheered at the photos of themselves, or booed if they thought they were unflattering. And make no mistake, many of them were unflattering, but that’s what “real” is. If we all allowed ourselves to be seen at our less attractive moments, it might be easier to be a person in this world. There’s a sense of coked-out debauchery to them, but also the feeling that these were just a bunch of misfit kids (as opposed to people wearing the costumes of misfit kids) thrown together because they had nowhere else to go.
Then the party ended, badly, and still Goldin took pictures. She took pictures of Cookie looking lost at her husband’s funeral after he died of AIDS, and then Cookie gradually wasting away, and then Cookie in her casket, resplendent in white lace and gold. Americans have a lot of Puritanical hang-ups when it comes to depicting illness and death, but Goldin’s photos ask what’s so bad about showing things as they really are? It’s ugly sometimes, yes, but it’s life. Cookie existed, and then she didn’t anymore, and the injustice of that should have been memorialized.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is predominantly about Goldin’s need to make people see. Beyond her arresting and frank photography, she speaks openly and unapologetically both about having done sex work in the past, and about her addiction to OxyContin, which almost resulted in a fatal overdose. As part of a settlement, several members of the Sackler Family were ordered to listen to testimonies of individuals who had either struggled with an addiction to OxyContin, or lost a loved one to it. In one haunting moment, a couple plays a recording of the panicked 911 call reporting their late son’s overdose. The Sacklers look alternately bored, uncomfortable, or annoyed, and it’s impossible to tell what they’re thinking. But at least they’re not able to look away.
It all gradually comes back to the grief Goldin still feels for her sister Barbara, gone since the 1960s, and their mother’s pathological need to keep up appearances. Unable to handle Barbara’s rebelliousness (though one of many psychiatrists who treated her suggested in his notes that her mother was the actual problem), Goldin’s parents shuffled her from hospital to hospital, eventually refusing to let her come home at all. It’s not entirely clear what was wrong with Barbara, other than depression, but it seems likely that facing it with honesty as a family would have helped, rather than treating the whole thing as an embarrassing secret, much like drug addiction and later AIDS would be. Pretending unpleasant things don’t exist never makes them better, and yet it’s how we choose to address them, over and over.
Though the pictures she took were never graphic or intimate, I come back to my grandmother’s habit of photographing everything, even the bathroom of the hotel she stayed at when attending the 1964 World’s Fair. I don’t know how often she would go back and look at old photos, I think it just mattered that she could if she wanted to. I admire (and think about with envy) her ability to simply take a picture (or several) without really thinking about if it was necessary, or if it would be a “good” picture (whatever that means), or if anyone else would think it was weird or inappropriate that she did it. I am not the artist and creator I would like to be, because I can’t get past that. But she could, and on a grander, far more influential scale, so could Nan Goldin. They took the pictures, without worrying about whether what they were photographing mattered, because as far as they were concerned, it all mattered.
If you want to know more about Cookie Mueller, best known for her appearances in Female Trouble and Pink Flamingos, I highly recommend Edgewise: a Portrait of Cookie Mueller, an affectionate oral history of Mueller’s colorful life.