Sisters, Saints and Sibyls

Sisters, Saints and Sibyls is Nan Goldin’s photographic account of her sister Barbara’s life and death, built from hospital reports, family snapshots and Goldin’s own pictures.

Barbara Goldin was born in May 1946. At twelve she was sent to a psychiatric detention facility, spent the next six years in various institutions, and took her own life in 1965 at the age of eighteen. The book sets medical records and family photographs beside references to Saint Barbara, and it runs Barbara’s story alongside Goldin’s own addiction and recovery. Goldin calls the work “a tribute to my sister and to all rebellious women struggling to survive in society.” This Thames & Hudson hardcover has 144 pages and 150 color illustrations. It was published in June 2026, timed to a Goldin retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris that opened in March 2026, and the publisher lists an earlier Sisters, Saints and Sibyls from 2005.

Goldin was born in 1953. She is an American photographer known for diaristic pictures of love, identity, addiction and the LGBTQ+ community, and she has shown at MoMA, Gagosian and Moderna Museet. Her earlier books include The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986) and The Devil’s Playground (2003).