Nan Goldin

“It was important to me, the way I developed, that I didn’t stay in my nuclear family. It’s also why my friends have always been my family. I mean it’s become a trite kind of statement-‘the chosen family’-but when I first wrote about it in 1985 in the Ballad [of Sexual Dependency] book, it wasn’t trite then. It was still a kind of new notion to people.... They’re the most important to me in the world, my friends. More important than family, lovers, my career.”

-Nan Goldin, 2017

This photograph presents the artist’s longtime friend Vivienne Dick, an Irish filmmaker whom she met in New York in 1978. It is emblematic of Goldin’s candid and unposed views of the lives of her circle of friends, often in the most private settings in their homes.

Nan Goldin gained international recognition in the 1980s for The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a series of intensely personal color portraits of herself and friends

that was first presented as a slide show in downtown New York clubs and bars. This portrait, also known as Vivienne in the green dress, NYC, depicts the experimental filmmaker Vivienne Dick (Irish, born 1950) and appeared among the images in that continually updated autobiographical work. By adopting the snapshot style, Goldin, who thinks of her subjects as family, draws viewers into the intimacy of her relationships.