I always thought if I photographed anyone or anything enough, I would never lose the person, never lose the memory. But the pictures show me how much I’ve lost
Nan Goldin “Afterword,” The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1996)
All The Beauty and The Bloodshed. Dir. Laura Poitras (2022).
For two weeks images of art, addiction, AIDS and activism have circled through my mind after seeing Laura Poitras’s film All The Beauty and The Bloodshed about the photographer-turned-activist Nan Goldin. All this then intersected with the body cam and CCTV footage of Tyre Nichols’s murder in Memphis. I’ve only seen a fraction of it. It was enough. Put together, what do they say about white sight, this week of all weeks?
In this mash-up, the post-2020 conjuncture of white supremacy and resistance is revealed. This conjuncture articulates sadistic domination— whether by police, opioids, sexual abuse/rape, legislative heteronormativity, or white supremacy—with the financial extraction of pain and its relief. In the US, 100 million people are estimated to live in pain, of whom 25 million suffer from “chronic” pain. Pain is metamorphosed into dollars as it once was on the plantation but in reverse. Where violence once produced commodities, pain—whether caused by workplace injury, sport or illness— is financialized via relief.
This dominated zone, in which the infliction and relief of pain oscillate, is at the center of what white sight now sees. Policing, as the Tyre Nichols case manifestly demonstrates, is about the application of pain. Pain has enormous potential for extraction of all kinds from prescription drugs to narcotics and, not least, votes. Addiction itself can be extracted into medication and treatment. All this violence cannot be looked at directly if one is to stay sane. It all but requires dissociative seeing.
Poitras’s film connects Nan Goldin’s work as a photographer with her experiences of loss, trauma, opioid addiction and her subsequent activism against opioids, without being reductive as to cause and effect. I’m borrowing that framework here, as in the semi-appropriated title. Unbuilding white sight isn’t “just” a moral and political imperative—which it certainly is. It’s now a matter of public health, mental and physical.
Part 1: Blue Sadism and Surveillance
Blue sadism is the unjustified infliction of pain by police as a means of social control and personal satisfaction. I don’t care what consenting adults choose to do. But consent is nowhere to be found here. Tyre Nichols did his best to “comply,” a verb applied both to policing and medication regimes. He could not, as was intended, “allowing” the police to inflict more and more pain.
In the age of social media and saturation surveillance, police now present themselves as “Blue,” as in “Back the Blue” or “Blue Lives Matter.” In November 2020, I wrote: “To be ‘blue’ is to bring together all the tangled desires and frustrations connoted by whiteness into a spatialized subjugation to police authority.” That space is the “America” now supposed to become great again once it is fully blue.
Despite the insurrection, that goal was frustrated. Nonetheless, both police shootings and police budgets are running at record levels. The contradiction between police empowerment locally and what they and their allies perceive as a “lost” federal government has created a new Lost Cause. Post-2020, police have reasserted that they alone have what geographer David Harvey calls the “right to the city,” from subway surveillance to shootings. The slightest “resistance” is met with bursts of spectacular sadism. That violence is all too political in the classic sense of control of the polis, the city.
As a psychic formation, blue sadism is uneven. As police, Black officers don’t see themselves as Black but as blue, as in those who participated in Nichols’s killing. They don’t see people they encounter as similar to them but simply as a “threat” to be neutralized. When out of uniform, Black police officers may be attacked by police because they are now seen as Black not blue. Equally, any police resisting the claim of “Back the Blue” to constitute power as such are subject to violence, as on January 6th 2021. One insurrectionist actually beat a police with a “Back the Blue” flag that day.
In the post-2020 conjuncture, the opposite of blue is not articulated as “Black people” but as “crime.” Saturation policing from Broken Windows in New York to SCORPION in Memphis makes everyday life while BIPOC into criminal activity. Nichols’s stop for an alleged traffic offense, and its instant acceleration by the cops into “resisting arrest,” is how blue sadism now makes a crime where none existed. Once Nichols fled toward his mother’s house, 100 yards away, the police had created a “fugitive” and he was treated as if it were 1850 not 2023.
Making police violence visible has not curtailed or restrained their actions. Body cam footage is intended as a “vital tool in improving and enhancing the safety of officer and civilian interactions,” to quote the NYPD manual. As usual, most of the cops in Memphis had turned their cameras off. Just as in the 2014 murder of Laquan McDonald, convictions depend on those that forget. This time there was CCTV too, designed to help police watch the neighborhood. They all forgot that.
So unbearable was the spectacle of the police’s sadism that the horror was used to suppress protest. On January 27, when the video was set to be released just as soon as the evening TV news watched by older white voters finished, scowling NYPD were already in place behind barricades in Brooklyn subway stations by 2pm. Noisy police helicopters were aloft from 7pm. In effect, the police dared activists to come out and expose their bodies to NYPD beatings. New Yorkers wisely bided their time.
Part Two: Dependency and Dissociative Seeing
Nan Goldin, Kenny Putting On Make Up. (1973). Collection of the author
I’ve followed Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency for thirty or more years now. Opening the book again for the first time in ages after seeing Poitras’s film and after the murder of Tyre Nichols, it felt different.
Reading Goldin’s opening statement, I was struck how in the week following the suicide of her sister Barbara Holly Goldin in 1965:
I was eleven…I was seduced by an older man. During this period of the greatest pain and loss, I was simultaneously awakened to intense sexual excitement. In spite of the guilt I suffered I was obsessed by my desire./ My awareness of the power of sexuality was defined by these two events.
I don’t question Goldin’s experience, or her recollection of it. But she was eleven. Perhaps the key word in that paragraph is “power.” Whoever deployed their power to “seduce” (Freud’s term for child abuse) her was doing so sadistically, taking her emotional distress as an opportunity to do what he wanted.
Nan and Barbara Holding Hands. Photo via All The Beauty and The Bloodshed website.
It was not without consequence. At fourteen, Goldin ran away and by eighteen she was living in a queer community in New England and began to photograph. In All The Beauty, Goldin says photography finally gave her a voice. A survivor’s voice, I would say, although she doesn’t. There are plenty of clues in the photographs. For all the claim to voice, almost no one is communicating across The Ballad. Unless you read sex and violence as messages.
Cookie at Tin Pan Alley. Nan Goldin.
One review quoted on the cover sees the book as a “taxonomy” of alternative culture. I don’t see it as anything like that dispassionate. Far from a neutral lens, the photographs have multiple authors, indicating different and dissociative ways of seeing.
Goldin twice calls a picture a “self-portrait,” claiming to be an artist. In the film, Goldin recalled being told in 1985 that there were no women artists. The self-portraits themselves are not so bold. Once we see her blurry face in the corner of a mirror in a cold London bathroom. In the other, her face and breast are seen slightly out-of-focus in the bottom right-hand corner of an angled photo of her cluttered bedroom. This is not a confident “self” or one that claims the right to be seen as they were. The “self” seen is diminished and is trying to take up hardly any space, to disappear.
Several times the photographer is named as “Nan.” The first photograph of the book is Nan On Brian’s Lap on her birthday in 1981, a sweet picture. After many more photos of Brian comes the iconic Nan After Being Battered (1984). The photographer looks down at the camera through two nasty black eyes. We learn from the film she nearly lost sight in one eye. The photograph was taken a month after the assault. Sadism comes in all colors.
“Nan” next appears with two other men, both appearing to pressure her into sex. Again, we learn from the film that she was briefly a sex worker. A bed from a “whorehouse” in The Ballad came from her workplace. In the final section of the book is the photograph that became the cover Nan and Brian In Bed. A clothed “Nan” is looking up and across at naked, smoking Brian, caught up as ever in his fantasy of tough guy masculinity, echoing his pose in Goldin’s photograph tacked above the bed.
In just one picture, she is simply “me”: Me On Top of my Lover Boston 1978. The lover in question is not Brian. Brian was dependency. Here she is on top, literally and perhaps metaphorically. Unsurprisingly, Brian tried to prevent the book from being published.
There is a fourth persona present in all the photographs—the one that takes the photograph. “I” and “me” both appear in section titles, like “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” as in the Velvet Underground; or “I Put A Spell on You,” the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins song. As I watch Goldin watching her selves and her friends, what once seemed singular—a diary as she puts it—feels both associatively and dissociatively collective, or at least, not a single being.
Her family-by-choice that is seen on the beach from Mexico to Provincetown was trying to create a new way to be in the world: marginal by preference to mainstream heteronormativity. That option is parodied at the start of the book by the waxwork of the British fascists Edward VIII and Wallace Simpson.
If that effort always had the odds stacked against it, the devastating effects of the AIDS epidemic on queer and drug-using communities made it all but impossible. At the same time—without wanting in any way to see this as a “benefit”— AIDS prompted the formation of ACT UP (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) whose direct action methods continue to set the direction for the politics of refusal and resistance.
Part 3: De-Invisibilizing Extractive Addictions
All The Beauty and The Bloodshed evokes all these layers of beauty, loss, disappointment and engagement, even as it de-invisibilizes the bloodshed of extractive addiction. Over a fifty year span, the pain of human bodies has again become a resource to be exploited and extracted by racial capitalism, even as its inevitable consequences of addiction and crime are sadistically punished by police and mass incarceration.
PAIN Die-In in the Temple of Dendur 2018. Photo: JC Bourcart via PAIN.
The moments in the film of preparing to do an action in museums were very familiar to me. Goldin’s group PAIN began their 2018 action in the Met with a mic check, like Occupy Wall Street, and then did a “die-in,” as pioneered by ACT UP and later used by Black Lives Matter. The highly-curated museum space made a powerful backdrop for the distribution of blood-stained cash and pill bottles.
PAIN had an extra dimension with the participation of an A-list artist like Goldin, whose refusal to show at London’s National Portrait Gallery unless Sackler money was declined prompted the mass removal of their name from museums across Europe and North America. The scene where PAIN activists go and see the blanked space in the Met where the Sackler name used to be is powerful.
There’s just a touch of melancholy—where next? the emptiness asks. There’s a sense, too, that the peaceful disruption of public space that has been the signature of anarchist- and ACT UP-inspired direct action since the 1980s is at risk next to the violent, weapon-using assaults of far-right activism. Cops started using the chant “Whose streets? Our streets!” in St. Louis after the 2014 murder of Michael Brown.
A different kind of restitution was shown in the film when David, Richard and Theresa Sacker were required to listen to testimony by those who had lost friends or relatives to Oxycontin. The court did not allow transmission or recording of the testimony. Poitras was able to film via Goldin’s Zoom link, supplied to her as a witness. In 2018, a range of gymnasts had given such statements directly to serial abuser Larry Nassar in open court, which were recorded.
As part of their “bankruptcy” settlement, the Sacklers were required to watch but there was no mass audience. Goldin ironically commented: “It’s nice to finally see the Sacklers face-to-face.” But Richard Sackler, the architect of Oxycontin, kept his camera turned off. Even now, they get preferential treatment.
As All The Beauty documents, there were further limits to the anti-Sackler campaign’s success. Most museums have removed their name. By going “bankrupt,” the family kept $10 billion (some of which went in tax and some of which they reinvested, still leaving them with over $4 bn. in cash).
In 2022, a record 110,000 people died of opioid overdoses of all kinds. Black and Indigenous men were the worst affected groups. The media tell the story of opioid addiction as that of white pain and “deaths of despair.” Since 2020, the balance has shifted. It remains to be seen whether there will continue to be a media focus on addiction.
It pains me to say that the Sacklers are Jewish. Many but not all of the victims of Oxycontin at their bankruptcy hearing were white-presenting but at least one person testifying was visibly Black. PAIN have a Black activist take the lead at many of their public events in the US. Nothing is said directly in the film about the documented interface of Oxycontin with heroin, and now fentanyl, that has produced the rising death rates among minorities.
There’s a moment in All The Beauty where you can see these threads connect as a point of departure. A document is shown from Barbara Goldin’s medical records where the phrase that became the title was used. Just before that, it explains that Barbara was institutionalized because she was “involved” with a “Negro boy.” It’s not clear what “involved” meant, or if “boy” was an indication of age or a racist term. Was the whole affair a screen for homophobia? Why was she sent to an orphanage in any event and who authorized it?
Whatever the cause, the intersection of bureaucratized state and medical power with systemic discrimination was more than one teenager could resist.
In The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, there’s Goldin’s distinct aesthetic alongside the visible anaesthetics of drugs and alcohol on nearly every page. That was true when I was that age, yes, and I am no Puritan. Then again, I was anaesthetizing myself.
All The Beauty and The Bloodshed implies that Goldin’s activism recognizes another such intersection today and seeks to resist it. In the interfaces of this story lurk the police. In 1970s Boston, we see how police violence was directed at the queer circles that Goldin moved in, just as Sackler-funded private investigators later followed PAIN activists and NYPD arrested them outside then-Governor Cuomo’s office. Nonetheless, police behave very differently in the gilded palaces of philanthropic power than they do on street corners at night.
Next
Perhaps the greatest value of Goldin’s work over the arc of her career has been her interface of claiming the right to be seen for marginalized and under-represented groups with the de-invisibilizing of the operations of networked corporate power. Racial surveillance capitalism operates on the basis of “a pill for all our pain, a jail cell for every addict,” to quote author Sam Quinones. His work showed how Oxycontin interfaces with heroin to create a transnational opioid system that cross-hatches both the US-Mexico border and the border of legal and illegal drugs.
A visit to any pharmacy’s pain aisle shows that this a society in search of pain relief. What is the nature of that pain? To evoke what has been lost, Quinones used the unfortunate example of a segregated swimming pool called “Dreamland” in Portsmouth, Ohio. In the language of W.E.B. Du Bois, this pain would be the devaluation of the wages of whiteness, which once guaranteed a “psychological wage” via separate and unequal public facilities.
The present practices of white supremacy circle around the persistent assertion of that “pain” and its relief via blue sadism. In refusing that circulation of violence, it is necessary to define racializing surveillance capitalism as the production, distribution and exchange of pain and pain relief, whether mental, physical, psychic, or psychotic.