The book 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency', (1986) (Ballad), was dedicated "to the real memory of my sister, Barbara Holly Goldin." Nan Goldin was the youngest of four children in a very middle class family; born in Washington DC, her family soon moved to Maryland. Goldin at eleven was very close to her eighteen-year-old sister and knew about some of the problems she had in reconciling her sexuality with the attitudes of society, problems that led her to lie down on a railway track in front of a train. A few days after the shock of the suicide, and while she was still desperately mourning the loss of her sister, Goldin was seduced by an older man. Within that week she experienced both great loss and pain and was also "awakened to intense sexual excitement."(Ballad) These two dramatic events shaped the future of her life and her art.

I find it difficult to imagine the position she was in, with these immense emotional pressures coming at an age when I was still in short trousers and being taught that sex was a Latin numeric prefix. Life was not without its traumas, but mine were less dramatic. Goldin was confronted in those sudden and tragic events with forces that most of us become aware of slowly over a period and evolve mechanisms to deal with or repress, and it is hardly surprising that the issues behind them have dominated her work. I don't share her lifestyle or some of her attitudes, but I admire the honesty and clarity of her approach.

Fearing that she might too literally follow in her sister's footsteps, Goldin ran away from home and its repressive attitudes at the age of fourteen to be able to live in her own way. She drifted through a series of foster homes, eventually ending up in a flat share with half a dozen other disaffected teenagers. These friends became a new family to her, and among them were two people who were to become her greatest friends, David Armstrong and Suzanne Fletcher. It was here in the summer of 1972 she first took up photography, although she had already started shooting movies. Her first photographs - and her cine footage - were pictures of herself and her friends dressed up and heavily made up, striking dramatic poses as the movie stars of their dreams. David was her favourite model - he was just discovering drag - and he also became a photographer.

Goldin relates her photography to the death of her sister. She feels the obsession with recording her friends comes from a realisation that although she remembered the things Barbara has said to her, she had lost "the tangible sense of who she was, what her eyes looked like" (Ballad) and she was determined not to let that happen again. Later when many of her friends were suffering from Aids, she had a feeling she could keep them alive if she photographed them enough. Of course what she could and has kept alive is a memory of them, but photography has perhaps kept her alive also.

She describes in one of her later books, 'The Other Side' (1993) how she first saw some drag queens on the street in Boston in 1972, and immediately followed them and took some Super 8 footage. A few months later, at the age of 18, following an introduction to them by David Armstrong at 'The Other Side', a drag club in Boston, she had moved in with a pair of them and was busy photographing them and their friends.

The Cibachrome process tends to exaggerate colour, producing highly saturated results which maximizes the apparent sharpness of transparency film. The kind of glow - often yellow or orange - that she gets in some of the pictures comes easily and naturally from this process. Since 1990 she has worked with Leica M6 rangefinder cameras. Some of her more recent work seems to show a more natural lighting effect, possibly through the use of more sophisticated flash equipment with larger reflectors.

Much has been talked of the 'Boston School' of photographers, including Goldin and David Armstrong along with Mark Morrisroe (1959-89), Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and Jack Pierson (although Goldin didn't meet Pierson until 1985 in New York.) They were all of a similar age, moved to New York around 1980, had similar tastes in music and drugs and often photographed each other as well as mutual friends.

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