Marvin Heiferman: I'm sitting here with Nan Goldin on, I don't know, January 11th or 12th…

Nan Goldin: Something like that. I don't control the time.

Marvin:… to talk about control which sometimes seems to me, in many ways, to be what photography is all about. Cameras are designed to register light in certain ways and photographers work either with or around that.

you control the world when you photograph it

Nan: I think the control is mine. You control the world when you photograph it.

Marvin: On the theme of control, let’s go way back to when I met you...

Nan: And I joked that I was ‘your little monster’?

Marvin: Which made me laugh, but what fascinated me – as you and I worked to get your work shown, and produced the Ballad as a slideshow -- was your control over picture making. The book, which we worked on with Suzanne Fletcher and Mark Holborn, was a collaborative effort in controlled narrative: editing the slideshow’s 700+ pictures down to about 120 pictures.

Nan: And the text that came from hours of interviews down to three pages. I remember it as being so hard. And the people who wouldn't let us use their pictures in it was another attempt at control...

Marvin: I remember standing on a street in the East Village, screaming up at Brian's window, trying to get him to come downstairs to sign a model release. And he wouldn’t. I remember that there were some pictures of him – on the toilet, after he’d just come -- he didn’t want used. And I know that long after the book was printed and reprinted, there’s people who’ve wished their pictures weren’t in it.

Nan: And my father didn't want me to publish the book, because he thought I was trying to prove that he killed my sister, Barbara. That was a huge thing that went on behind the scenes.

Nan Goldin, *French Chris on the convertible, New York City* (1979) From slideshow *The Ballad of Sexual Dependency*, 1981–2022; © Nan Goldin. Courtesy of Moderna Museet

Marvin: Let’s talk about control and the Ballad on two levels: the pictures and what happened to the pictures after you made them. You wrote in the Ballad: "I want to be uncontrolled and controlled at the same time. The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember."

Nan: I wrote that at a very different time in my life. I don't think about myself in those terms, now. I think what I meant is that I wanted to be able to let go, live in the moment, be fully present when I was photographing and not have to think beyond that.

Marvin: When you were taking those pictures, did you have a preconceived sense of what they were going to look like as you made them?

Nan: No. Mostly I had no idea how they would come out. Sometimes they came out just as black film. There was no technical setup at all. It was all about having relationships with people that allowed me to photograph them often enough that they weren't aware of being photographed anymore. I would just lift the camera to my eye and take a picture and not set anything up. And in that way, I felt that it was uncontrolled, because it was trying to capture what was right in front of me and being part of it at the same time.

Marvin: From the start, your pictures had a real sense of, I don't know what to call it, Nan-ness about them, of being beautifully put together.

Nan: You're the first one who really saw them outside of art school in Boston. Did you think really think that or that they were wild and something that had not been done before?

Marvin: They were, from the start, great-looking in terms of their composition, honesty, intelligence, energy and sense of color. It was just there, all there. I remember looking at that picture of a couple with dirty feet, fucking in bed, and thinking it wasn't supposed to be beautiful, yet was.

Nan: The dirt was part of the beauty for me. They were reality, unvarnished. There’s a sense of smell in them.

Marvin: I remember you were always writing, too.

I think in a way photographs hurt your memory…They become their own thing

Nan: I wrote down everything that happened, everything people said. It wasn't just ‘I did this’ and ‘I did that’ or ‘I went here.’ I wrote even during sex, all the time. There are hundreds of those little diaries. I stopped doing that when I was about 40. And in a way, I think photographs hurt your memory. They don't help it, because you don't have to remember. Now, when I look at images from the past, they rarely spark these deep memories. They become their own thing.

Marvin: People talk about photography as a way of outsourcing memory, which sounds like what you're talking about.

Nan: Actually, the writing was the most obsessive part of it. I would never go back and read those. I went back and listened to my answering machines messages when I was making Memory Lost, the slideshow about addiction, and that was enough. When I die, I want those diaries burned.

Marvin: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras’ recent documentary feature film about you, underscores how photography became a way to deal with family dynamics situations that spiraled out of control and led to your sister’s suicide.

Nan: It was very much about not letting anybody else tell me what my experience and my reality was. Keeping a record of what actually happened to me, in order to fight against those forces of conformity and denial.

Nan Goldin, *Picnic on the Esplanade, Boston (1973);* From slideshow *The Other Side* 1992–2021; © Nan Goldin. Courtesy of Moderna Museet

Marvin: You’ve also written: "When I was 18, I started to photograph. For years, I thought I was obsessed with record keeping of my day to day life but recently I've realized my motivations have deeper roots. I don't really remember my sister. I remember my version of her but I don't remember the tangible sense of who she was, her presence, what her eyes looked like, what her voice sounded like."

Nan: : That’s true of so many of my people who I’ve lost.

Marvin: I was fascinated to see so many snapshots from your childhood in the film.

Nan: What could you read about the family?

Marvin: In retrospect? Their willful creation of happy family narratives.

Russel Hart, *Nan Goldin*. Courtesy of Nan Goldin

Nan: You would think that those snapshots would spark childhood memories and they rarely do. I would be so grateful if they did. I love snapshots, but they still don’t give me back my sister, which I would love them to. I'm not sure if photography breaks through that detachment. I would love it to. I'm working entirely in my archive now. I hardly take pictures and people in the ones I have seem frozen, mummified. Now that I’m out in the world again and when I run into people I haven’t seen since the 80s or 90s, I don't recognize them, because I've lived with and worked so intensely with pictures of them from when they were young. It’s also a way to stave off loss because I feel like they're with me. Very strongly. There’s no record of most of them growing old or having died. Sometimes I’ve photographed people after death.

Marvin: Do people in your pictures, especially those you photograph often time, control them in one way or another?

Nan: They have. For the queens in the '70s, I brought home lots of pictures, they’d each make piles of the ones they were in and compared who had the biggest piles. Then they’d rip stuff up they didn't like. I still have the negatives but I respected them enough to not print them.

Marvin: I remember times when we’d take pictures out of the slideshow, because people didn't want them in.

Nan: I respect and do that, as much as possible. I'm even more concerned about those things now...

Marvin: When the slideshows started screening with some regularity and people saw themselves onscreen or in prints became somewhat known for that, did they pose more, trying to represent the themselves the way they wanted to see themselves?

Nan: I think everyone does. Wolfgang Tillmans photographed me two weeks ago and when he sent them, he asked, "Do you see yourself in them?" That's a really good question, since I don’t even see myself in the mirror it’s tricky. I walk around with a very different image of myself in my head.

Marvin: Were drugs, over the years, controlling you and the pictures in a certain kind of way?

if you don't feel good in yourself, the drugs fill in some of the gaps

Nan: I don't think there was a difference between when I was high and when I wasn't, for a lot of my adult life. The drugs were part of who I was, unfortunately. If you don't feel good in yourself, the drugs fill in some of the gaps. And so, that's a form of control on the deepest level. I think the motivation to take drugs was to feel better in my skin, trying to control myself in a different way. There was a lack of boundaries, a kind of freedom that I felt back in those days with a lot of people, but not all of them, being high as well. People allowed themselves to be beautiful, but also not perfect.

Marvin: Control plays a role in what you do with pictures, once you have them, too. From a database of images you assemble, you decide which ones get called into service to help shape the relationships and stories you create. Depending on where they wind up and what images they’re adjacent to, they can be read in different ways.

Nan: I continue to use the same pictures in different contexts and even in different slideshows. In Memory Lost, I went through deep archival digging and that slideshow’s based on outtakes, including pictures that might be called bad, but that I love, pictures that are wounded.

Marvin: I remember being at your loft on the Bowery, standing next to you at the lightbox before slideshows, while you were choosing between reordering and traying slides and getting really nervous as time got short and the process started veering out of control…

Nan: I lived out of control in many of those years. The two and a half hours I was late for that slideshow we did at the Saint, in the East Village, was a good indication.

Unknown, *Nan Goldin in the Bathroom With Roommate, Boston*. Courtesy of Nan Goldin

Marvin: It was one of the most anxious situations I’ve been in, as a thousand people were getting restless, waiting for us to show up, while we were blocks away at your place, trying to pull things together. When you sent me a pdf of the poster for that show the other day, all I could think about was how crazy that was, until we somehow got things back on track…

Nan: Rene Ricard was with me and we were doing massive amounts of drugs. Actually, there's slides from that period that still have the imprint of cocaine all over them, which I love now, as artifacts. I was loading the slides into trays while showing them at The Saint.

Marvin: Another image that comes to mind, from back when you were still presenting the Ballad live, is of you standing next to pairs or stacks of slide projectors, holding remotes in both your hands…

Nan: Deciding when to change the pictures...

Marvin: I remember standing nearby, waiting to hand off the next carousel of slides to you, watching you synch the rhythm of the images slides to the beats of the soundtrack. We had to switch trays in three seconds, it never worked perfectly.

Nan: Now the slideshows are programmed and have been since the '90s, but I still change the timing, sometimes the images.

Nan Goldin, *Thora's eye, Brooklyn, NY*, 2021; Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. ©Nan Goldin

Marvin: It’s interesting how the Ballad’s reputation (and people's sense of it) still revolves around its being tied to it taking a romantic view of a Lower East Side bohemia in the 1980s. But when I watched a 2004 version of it recently, with some friends, about a third of the pictures in the Ballad were different from the ones I knew so well. And while I felt nostalgia for the old version of it, as I sat there two people who’d never seen it before and were bowled over by it, I kept saying to myself, “Wow, this still works!

Nan: I have to keep updating the Ballad or I can't look at it, because it has to be true to how I feel now. That's true with all of the other slideshows since, too. When I made Memory Lost, though, the process was different. We didn't start out with a preconceived idea or structure. All we knew was we wanted to make something about my addiction. We didn’t have a plan. We let it tell us what it was and evolve, little by little. And it's component images aren’t synced to lyrics, like the Ballad was.

Marvin: Subsequent slideshows reflect how you’ve increasingly been bringing in other people to work on different aspects of production. I guess you become more of a director.

Nan: That's a good way to put it. But I still edit frame with my editor. I like having other eyes and hands involved in the editing process.

Marvin: You always said you wanted to make films.

Nan Goldin, *The Hug, New York City (1980)* From slideshow *The Ballad of Sexual Dependency*, 1981–2022. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy of Moderna Museet

Nan: Now that the documentary is done, I want to make a narrative film. There's a book I'm trying to option… So in a way, maybe that's got something to do with taking control over somebody else's work.

Marvin: When I was pulling together notes for today, something else you wrote caught my eye: "Photography doesn't preserve memory as effectively as I thought it would. A lot of people in the book are dead now, mostly from AIDS. I had thought that I would stave off loss through photographing. I always thought if I photographed anyone or anything long enough, I would never lose that person. I would never lose the memory, I would never lose the place. But the pictures show how much I've lost." That got me thinking about how making art becomes a way to respond to and, perhaps, get some control over loss.

Nan: It's a driving force, a desire to preserve people, but it doesn't work. I think the most important thing about a person is the air between you. How you experience someone has so much to do with their voice, their smell, and how you feel around them. That doesn't come out in photography.

Marvin: But I’ve seen the influence your work has had, for example, over hundreds of graduate students I've worked with. I mention your work, everybody knows it and so, so many connect with who and what they see in it.

Nan: People have often said to me that they put themselves into the Ballad. It becomes their experience, and is not about watching other people's experience. That's the best thing that could happen. That’s why it’s important that people get over the fact that the Ballad was full of pictures in the '80s. Because it's not about that, it's about relationships and the human condition. Walt Whitman continually rewrote his book, Leaves of Grass, his whole life. That's how I feel about the Ballad. It’s kind of my Leaves of Grass.

Marvin: One last thing that I want to talk about briefly is the documentary and what it was like for you to have somebody else tell a story about your life?

the dirt was part of the beauty for me

Nan: I only agreed to being interviewed with the understanding that I would be able to control what was used. And while I didn’t have final cut, I did bring in more material, like other people speaking, and Alex and I re-edited a lot, especially my voice, section by section. What's amazing is that Laura, who could have said ‘fuck off,’ was true to her word and honored an emotional verbal contract.

Marvin: It's an all's-well-that-ends-well thing?

Nan: I can stand by it. And that has a lot to do with the critics who’ve understood it so beautifully, interpreted it so deeply and shown so much respect for me. If it had been slammed, I don't know how I would feel about it being in the world. It’s hard to give up your privacy in service of someone else’s vision - to not have it be entirely my version, to not have final cut.

Marvin: Maybe it took somebody from outside the art world to shape a bigger picture of all you’ve done in terms of AIDS activism, your work to get museums to stop working with the Sackler family and the impact of that on harm reduction. The art world often talks the talk about pressing issues. What’s extraordinary is that you’ve gone out, set things in motion, and things have changed as a result of that.

Nan: A small group of people involved in P.A.I.N (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), our advocacy group, sitting in this living room managed to change a whole narrative, not just about the museums with the Sackler name on them, but the whole relationship between toxic philanthropy and museums. That's the crazy thing.