Nan Goldin: Honey on a Razor Blade
Published by Steidl in collaboration with Moderna Museet, Honey on a Razor Blade brings together four of Nan Goldin’s most important slideshow works in book form for the first time. Across a slipcased set of volumes, the images are reproduced against black backgrounds and presented in their original sequence, preserving the rhythm and structure of works Goldin has often described as films made from still photographs.
The first volume, Memory Lost, explores addiction, intoxication and the claustrophobic experience of drug use. Drawing from Goldin’s vast archive of photographs, recordings and other material, it is a deeply personal work that she has described as her most significant since The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.
A second volume brings together Sirens and Salome, two works constructed from found footage. Sirens takes its title from the Greek myth of sailors seduced by pleasure toward destruction and evokes the ecstatic, disorienting experience of being high. Salome turns to themes of temptation, destruction and the male gaze.
In Stendhal Syndrome, Goldin places autobiographical photographs alongside images she made of paintings and sculptures in museums around the world. The work creates a dialogue between art history and lived experience, moving through recurring themes of love, desire and longing.
The set is completed by Heartbeat, a reader containing 36 texts commissioned by Goldin, many published here for the first time. Essays, interviews and other writings offer further insight into the slideshows and the different periods of her career, forming one of the most substantial collections of writing devoted to her work.
Spanning 528 pages, Honey on a Razor Blade offers a concentrated view of Goldin’s practice and of the way she has used photography, sequencing, sound and autobiography to address intimacy, sexuality, addiction, loss and mortality.
About the Author
Nan Goldin was born in Washington, DC, in 1953 and grew up near Boston. She began photographing as a teenager and became known in the 1970s and 1980s for intensely personal images of friends, lovers and chosen family, particularly within queer and transgender communities in Boston and New York. Her landmark work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, first developed as a slideshow and published as a book in 1986, transformed autobiographical photography through its direct portrayal of intimacy, desire, friendship, violence and loss. Goldin has also documented the impact of the AIDS epidemic and, in 1989, organized the influential exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at Artists Space in New York. Her later work has expanded into films, installations and large-scale slideshows, including Memory Lost and Stendhal Syndrome. In 2017 she founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), combining art and activism in response to the opioid overdose crisis. Goldin’s work has been the subject of major international exhibitions, including retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou and Moderna Museet. Her life, art and activism were also the focus of Laura Poitras’s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
