'Nan Goldin is doing great work in a very dark time'

She documented New York's party underworld, the ravages of the Aids crisis and took on the Sackler dynasty- now the feted photographer is the subject of an acclaimed new documentary by Laura Poitras. Hamish McBain sits down with the director

- Hamish McBain

THE documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras typically zones in on what she calls "individuals who are confronting abuses of power, particularly in the context of the United States" such as Julian Assange, or Edward Snowden, the subject of her Oscar-winning film Citizenfour. Her new work, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, documenting what some might consider a mere photographer of subcultures, could be seen as a lightweight shift in direction. But even notwithstanding that the film won the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival and is now in line for an Oscar, that would be to underestimate its subject, Nan Goldin, as both an artist and an activist.

Goldin, 69, is one of the great game-changers. Her seminal book and slideshow (her preferred form), The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, was first shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1985. Unlike her predecessor Diane Arbus, Goldin's way of chronicling New York was to turn her camera on her own life, the drag artists, club kids, drug addicts and hustlers who made up her group of friends to show them partying, fighting, breaking up, dreaming, taking drugs and having sex.

Her pictures became the benchmark for the flood of confessional photography that came after. Since she emerged with The Ballad, Goldin's work has been exhibited in galleries from Tate Modern to the Art Institute of Chicago, the Albertina in Vienna and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and she counts Madonna among her fans.