"Even if relationships are destructive, people cling together," photographer Nan Goldin writes in the introduction to the 1996 edition of her seminal monograph The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, originally published in 1986. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the unflinching, Oscar-nominated documentary helmed by Laura Poitras, is also about a "struggle between autonomy and dependency" – one waged by Goldin …
Editor’s Note: Keeping you in the know, Culture Queue is an ongoing series of recommendations for timely books to read, films to watch and podcasts and music to listen to. In that way, Poitras’ now Oscar-nominated documentary, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” began in the hands of its subject — and much like one of Goldin’s own artworks, it …
Nan Goldin in a photo from the 1970s in the documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.” Where life wounds, art and fellowship can heal, or at the very least, cauterize into the most expressive of scars. Photographer Nan Goldin knows this as much as anyone, her life’s journey from suburban captivity to outsider freedom, from Polaroid chronicler of her …
So many moving parts mesh so seamlessly in “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Laura Poitras’ galvanizing portrait of photographer Nan Goldin, that it feels like several movies blended into one. Adopting her collaborative subject’s unflinching yet also righteously energized spirit, the film pivots at the intersection of art, addiction and activism, reflecting on Goldin’s pioneering work and its often …
