Nan Goldin's Happy Ending

The demimonde photographer has long considered herself a filmmaker. What happened when a movie was made about her?

- By Kate Dwyer

My work has always been about making the private public but to a very limited audience," says - the photographer Nan Goldin, ashing an American Spirit. We are sitting in her sunny living room in Clinton Hill, treetops visible through the window. On the coffee table are cans of La Croix on Hilma af Klint coasters from the gift shop at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, which recently showed six of Goldin's slideshows and video installations in a retrospective titled "This Will Not End Well." Peter Hujar's black-and-white portrait of her friend the artist and activist David Wojnarowicz hangs above the mantel.

The show in Sweden (Amsterdam is the next stop) isn't what's making Goldin anxious; instead, it's Laura Poitras's documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which tells the intertwined stories of Goldin's art and activism. The movie didn't win the Oscar it was nominated for but is now streaming on HBO Max. "Think about if there was a two-hour film about you in the world, Goldin says. "It's an ambivalent experience. There's a lot of good feelings and bad feelings." She feels in her body the vulnerability of being exposed to such a large audience: "It's in my skin. It's not about thinking how people respond; it's not about worrying about the audience reaction. It's about my own reaction."