Nan Goldin accepts the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2024 CPW Vision Awards

Nan Goldin’s photographs have documented her life and the lives of her close friends during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and through the opioid crisis. In 2017, she launched P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) to combat the opioid crisis and to challenge the Sackler family, arts philanthropists and manufacturers of the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin. Her early photographs offered an intimate view of the subcultural demimonde of downtown New York in the 1970s, collected in the unforgettable 1986 book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Video © William Koenig-Vinicombe / Mosaic Vision Productions