
She also found the camera as a useful political tool, to inform the public about important issues silenced in America.

Still struggling from her sister's death, Goldin used the camera and photography to cherish her relationships with those she photographed. A Satya staff member (existential psychologist Rollo May's daughter) introduced Goldin to the camera in 1969 when she was sixteen years old. At 16 she enrolled at the Satya Community School in Lincoln. She left home by age 13 or 14 and subsequently lived in various foster homes. Goldin began to smoke marijuana and date an older man. By the time she was eighteen, she saw that her only way to get out was to lie down on the tracks of the commuter train outside of Washington, D.C. Because of the times, the early sixties, women who were angry and sexual were frightening, outside the range of acceptable behavior, beyond control. I saw the role that her sexuality and its repression played in her destruction. I was very close to my sister and aware of some of the forces that led her to choose suicide. This was in 1965, when teenage suicide was a taboo subject.

Goldin had early exposure to tense family relationships, sexuality, and suicide, as her parents often argued about Goldin's older sister Barbara who ultimately died by suicide when Goldin was 11: Goldin's father worked in broadcasting and served as the chief economist for the Federal Communications Commission. in 1953 to middle-class Jewish parents, and grew up in the Boston suburb of Swampscott, moving to Lexington in her teens. Early life The Hug, NYC, 1980, Cibachrome print by Goldin. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). She is a founding member of the advocacy group P.A.I.N.

The monograph documents the post- Stonewall, gay subculture and includes Goldin's family and friends. Her most notable work is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). Her work often explores LGBT subcultures, moments of intimacy, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the opioid epidemic. Nancy Goldin (born September 12, 1953) is an American photographer and activist.
