Few photographers have made the private life of a generation feel so public, and so tender. Nan Goldin, born in Washington DC in 1953, built her reputation by turning her camera on the people closest to her: friends, lovers, a chosen family in New York, and the losses that thinned it out. From 24 November, the Hayward Gallery gives her the first major UK institutional exhibition since 2002.
That gap is long enough to make this a real event. In the meantime Goldin has become as well known for her activism as for her pictures, taking on the opioid crisis and the institutions that profited from it with the same refusal to look away that marks her photography. The two halves of her story are not separate. The work insists that who gets seen, and who gets protected, is a political question.
© Nan Goldin, courtesy the artist and Gagosian
The setting helps. The Hayward is one of London's great brutalist buildings, on the Southbank Centre site at Belvedere Road, and its raw concrete galleries have long made colour pictures look sharper and more exposed. Goldin's saturated, flash-lit, close-range images should hold their own against that bare backdrop. Nothing here will feel like a polite white cube.
© Nan Goldin, courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Her best-known body of work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, shaped how a whole school of photographers think about intimacy and diary-like picture making. Even if you know it only through reproductions, seeing her prints at scale is a different experience. Faces are close, bedrooms are cramped, and the mood swings from joy to exhaustion within a single room.
© Nan Goldin, courtesy the artist and Gagosian
The exhibition runs from 24 November 2026 to 7 March 2027, which gives a long window, but the opening fortnight, 24 November to 6 December, will be the busiest and has its own special ticket release. If you want the galleries at their calmest, aim for a weekday and book a timed slot rather than turning up. Allow a good couple of hours. Work this emotionally dense is better taken slowly, with a break halfway.
© Nan Goldin, courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Pair it with a walk along the river afterwards. The South Bank in late autumn and winter is at its best at dusk, and a stretch beside the water is a useful way to absorb what you have just seen.
Best for A weekday visit, before the crowds.
