“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” Authentically Documents Nan Goldin’s Personal Rebellions and Public Revolutions

How the renowned photographer highlighted America’s profit-fueled epidemics by directing her subversive technique against art institutions themselves

“It’s easy to make your life into stories. But it’s harder to sustain real memories…” 

In 1973, Nan Goldin emerged into the art world with her first photography exhibit in Boston, exchanging sex for a cab ride to a small art show. In 1995, the Sackler family emerged into the art world with their first multi-million dollar donation to the Guggenheim Museum following the FDA’s approval of Purdue Pharma’s new semi-synthetic opioid known as OxyContin. Twenty two years later, after publishing nearly 2,500 works, Goldin opened up about her addiction to the drug — and the same year, with nearly 30 art institutions bearing their name worldwide, the Sackler pharmaceutical empire’s death toll reached 400,000. 

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an affirming portrait of photographer Nan Goldin that gives an all-encompassing context to her body of work, her unrelenting activism for harm reduction, and her push for accountability for the Sackler family, weaving together a combination of Goldin’s still photography, film, family history, love, loss, and advocacy. 

Goldin’s work has always been transgressive. After leaving her suburban family home in her early teen years, she began photographing her close friends and surroundings as she explored youth and young adulthood in the underground queer scenes of Boston and New York. Her work was an empathetic documentation of drug use, queer subcultures, sex work, and autobiographical examinations of her own love life and personal experiences. These transgressive qualities never subsided, even when Goldin became a staple in the permanent collections of many prestigious art museums. As a renowned member of this community, she waged war against the art world by confronting some of the most powerful donors in the United States.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed follows her transition from documenting subversive music and art subcultures to the AIDS epidemic and its impact on her environment and relationships, contrasting her personal history with the here and now. Goldin’s work punctuates the trauma of two mass epidemics and how corporate and governmental neglect led to the widespread murder of marginalized communities. 

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is poetic and perplexing, navigating both Goldin’s artistic history and the tribulations of the activist group P.A.I.N (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), which led the movement to see the Sackler family held accountable and to remove their names from museums around the world. Goldin says, “If anyone belongs in jail, it’s these people, and as long as there’s a jail, they should be in it. Until the whole prison system is dismantled, they should be the last to leave.”

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a grief-driven call to action, both desperate and patient, that understands that we cannot stop condemning those in power until their structures are stripped away entirely. The film is provocative and meant to disrupt the false American perception that profit-fueled epidemics began and ended with the AIDS crisis (which is still steadily on the rise due to global asymmetry in the distribution of treatment). It warns us of the continuing and unsettling entanglement of capital and healthcare, and that millions around the world could still be alive if it weren’t for the barricades created by for-profit pharmaceuticals. 

Although the film concludes with P.A.I.N.'s success in removing the Sackler name from nearly every American art institution, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed does not concern itself with simple endings. Goldin chooses to conclude the film where it began, coming to terms with the suicide of her older sister in the small world of her dysfunctional family. Nan Goldin chose to publicize her life authentically as both an artistic and political act, using love, grit, beauty, and bloodshed to both mourn and marvel at life and death.

“[This is] the difference between the story and the real memory. The real experience has a smell and is dirty and is not wrapped up in simple endings. The real memories are what affects me now. Things can appear that you didn’t want to see, where you’re not safe. And even if you don’t actually unleash the memories, the effect is there. It’s in your body.”

OVERALL RATING: 10/10

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed was released on November 23 and is currently in theaters and on demand.