Star photographer destroys the “good” reputation of the clan that feeds America on opioids

Simon Meier

This is the story of Barbara, who is run over by a train in 1965, shortly before her 19th birthday. That is the story of more than 700,000 people who have died of AIDS in the US since the mid-1980s. This is the story of hundreds of thousands of people who lost their lives because of the opioid crisis in the United States.

It’s a story about people failing in the American healthcare system. And it is a film by the American documentary maker and Oscar winner Laura Poitras. A sad, touching, touching and hopeful film. A few years ago, Poitras accompanied Edward Snowden at the time of his revelations in “Citizenfour”. For All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, she spent years with New York photographer Nan Goldin, becoming her confidante and documenting her amazingly successful fight against the crime-ridden Sackler dynasty.

Nan Goldin, who turns 70 this year, has long been regarded as the world’s foremost photographer. From the 1980s, she documented New York’s queer underground, all the glamorous, ripped, creative, broken, young, elderly, exhausted, over-enthusiastic, hopeful or disillusioned people she was a part of. Her photos became a butterfly collection of beauty, sex and a lot of pain over and over again. Sickness, death and injury were part of everyday life, at the latest when AIDS was raging. Drugs were part of it anyway. Before the 1990s made heroin chic fit for H&M, Goldin showed its reality in her photos.

There is, she says today in front of the camera, the memory and the stories you make of it. The stories are polished, round, have a logic. The memories themselves are whimsical and capricious, dirty and complicated, often smelly, smelly and lodge in the body.

Nan Goldin’s early memories are horrifying. She grew up as the second daughter of a middle-class family in “a claustrophobic suburb” of Washington. The parents had no talent for parenting. When the eldest daughter Barbara hits puberty, they declare her “mentally ill” and send her first to an orphanage and then from one psychiatric clinic to another.

In the hospital reports Nan Goldin first read a few years ago, a psychiatrist wrote that it was the mother who belonged in a clinic, not Barbara. And another doctor writes that Barbara once talked about “all the beauty and it blushed” in her head. On April 12, 1965, Barbara left the hospital grounds. She asks the residents of a railroad when the next train is coming. Then she lays down on the rails.

The death of her beloved sister is the shock in Nan Goldin’s life that changes everything. The parents give the eleven-year-old away, she goes from foster home to foster home, loses her speech for a few months, her salvation is finally a hippie school, a gay best friend and photography. The silent eye. She first moves with her boyfriend to Boston, where she studies art, then to the queer town of Provincetown on Cape Cod, and finally the ever-growing surrogate family ends up in New York.

It took Nan Goldin a long time to become the global cult artist she is today, before she was also discovered by the fashion scene and photographed for brands such as Jimmy Choo and Dior. As a young woman, she often pays her bills with sex.

In 1989 she was commissioned to curate an exhibition. She doesn’t even have to think about her subject: AIDS. She wants to show art on the subject and art by artists suffering from AIDS, wants to break the taboo on the ‘gay epidemic’, wants to create awareness and publicity for it, wants to make a difference politically.

The American counterpart of the Federal Office for Culture withdraws its support because homosexuality and AIDS are not subjects for an exhibition. The then very old and respected composer Leonard Bernstein turned down the National Medal of Art in solidarity with Goldin. The debate is huge. And Nan’s friends keep dying. “We became professional carriers,” says someone who later dies of AIDS.

The more famous Nan Goldin becomes, the more her paintings hang in the largest museums in the world. And in all of them there is a Sackler Courtyard, a Sackler Hall, a Sackler Wing, in the Louvre, in the British Museum, in the Tate Gallery, in the Metropolitan Museum, in the Guggenheim Museum and so on. The Pharma family is happy and generous in supporting the arts. Or in the ubiquitous flagships of the art scene. They adorn themselves with cultural and intellectual capital. Visual culture through artwashing.

The Sacklers have been making their money in their own Purdue pharmaceutical company since the 1980s with a prescription painkiller first called MS Contin and from 1996 OxyContin. Of the million people counted as victims of the opioid crisis since 1999, some 200,000 are on OxiContin or similar prescription drugs.

In 2014, Nan Goldin discovered how quickly and thoroughly OxiContin causes addiction: She breaks her wrist, undergoes surgery and is given OxiContin for the pain. The prescribed three pills a day soon becomes 18, a dealer supplies her with more and cheaper, harder replacement drugs, finally with fentanyl, Goldin overdoses and barely survives. She is 61 at the time, it is not the first time she has entered rehab, but when she comes back she has a clear enemy for the first time: The Sacklers.

She goes into battle with all her weight as an artist. She expects to ruin her career forever. She doesn’t care. There’s more at stake than her fame. She founded the action group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). And PAIN is now demonstrating in the New York museums and in front of the Louvre. Demonstrate wherever “Sackler” is written. Goldin threatens to withdraw her paintings and cancel entire exhibitions if museums continue to accept and purge the Sacklers’ blood money.

And the miracle happens: the museums agree to the artist’s demands. The Louvre, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the Serpentine Gallery and the Tate Gallery in London, the Guggenheim Museum and many more cut off all business contact with the Sacklers. The company’s art wash is dead, image maintenance no longer works.

But the Sacklers used a trick anyway: the multifaceted drug company Purdue filed for bankruptcy, avoiding 3,000 upcoming lawsuits. Before the bankruptcy, the family raised 10 billion for itself. She is paying out 6 billion in settlements, for which she is demanding unlimited immunity for herself and her heirs. The money is distributed among the various US states. The cost of the opioid crisis is estimated to be $1 trillion or $1 trillion.

“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” won the Venice Film Festival in 2022 and was nominated for an Oscar in 2023. It’s a shocking movie, so many people you fall in love with are on the credits under “In Memoriam”, there so many sad stories are told. And so many images of Nan Goldin and Laura Poitras – two women behind their cameras – draw a moving arc through some American decades of beauty and bloodshed with tenderness and anger.

“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” hits theaters April 27.