Directed by Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, All The Beauty And The Bloodshed (announced just last week as a nominee for Best Documentary in this year's Academy Awards®) is an epic story about artist and activist Nan Goldin, told through her groundbreaking photography and rare footage of her fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid overdose crisis.
The film interweaves Goldin's past and present, the deeply personal and urgently political, from her organization P.A.I.N.'s direct actions at renowned art institutions to Goldin's photography of her friends and peers through her epic The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and her 1989, NEA-censored AIDS exhibition, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing.
"Almost exact contemporaries (born four months and one week apart, both 69 years old as I write this), Nan Goldin (b. September 12, 1953) and Cindy Sherman (b. January 19, 1954) are often linked in contemporary art history as women photographers whose solo careers started in more or less the mid 1970s—in Boston and Buffalo, respectively—and who skyrocketed to artworld (and New York City) stardom during the 1980s. Although their approaches to photography and their subject matters are vastly different, and the work of each is unique and celebrated in its own signature way, both artists are credited with both remaking photography as a medium and placing that medium at the center of the contemporary art of the last quarter of the 20th century. Without exaggeration, Sherman’s Untitled (Film Stills) (1977–1980, debuting at Hallwalls in 1979, after she had already moved to NYC) and Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986) were two of the most celebrated, epochal, and enduring bodies of work by any American artist in any medium of the 1980s" (Edmund Cardoni).
