This Will Not End Well
The first comprehensive book on Nan Goldin's filmmaking practice, reconstructing nearly a dozen of her slideshows and moving-image works on the page.
Moderna Museet, Stockholm organized the retrospective the book was published to accompany. It translates works assembled from thousands of photographs, film sequences, audio tapes, and music tracks into a sequence of 374 images printed on black backgrounds. It follows the pacing of the original slideshow and film installations rather than reformatting them as a conventional photo survey. The material spans the full arc of Goldin's practice: the bohemian and queer communities of her early Ballad of Sexual Dependency years, family trauma, the AIDS crisis, and, in later work, her own addiction and recovery. Twenty newly commissioned texts accompany the images. Contributors include critics, novelists, poets, and collaborators such as Eileen Myles, Lucy Sante, Sarah Schulman, Vince Aletti, and Patrick Radden Keefe, alongside earlier writing by David Wojnarowicz and Cookie Mueller. Steidl and Moderna Museet co-published the 216-page clothbound hardcover in 2022; it has since gone through further printings.
Goldin (b. 1953) is among the most influential photographers of her generation, known for a diaristic, unguarded style that first reached wide audiences through The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). She has continued through decades of slideshow and film work exploring intimacy, loss, and dependency. This Will Not End Well is the fullest account yet published of that moving-image practice, which has often been overshadowed by her still photography.
