On Wednesday March 15, the documentary “All the beauty and the blood spilled” is released in French cinemas, which tells the story of American photographer Nan Goldin’s fight against the Sackler family, which markets OxyContin, a very addictive painkiller.
We all have a different way of dealing with the misfortunes of the world around us: there are those who look away, those who try to continue their journey and those who face without ever lowering their eyes. Clairemnet, Nan Goldin belongs to this last category. She was born in the 1950s in Washington, had an unhappy childhood, marked by the suicide of her older sister, and left the family home at a very young age.
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She immersed herself in the New York underground scene where she discovered photography. She decides to document everything that America does not want to see: drugs, prostitution, domestic violence… This gives very strong photos like this series from 1993 that can be seen at the European House of Photography in Paris , dedicated to his friend Gilles who is dying of AIDS watched over by his companion.
We see the decline of the body, but also the love, the desire to the end, until this overwhelming farewell kiss on a hospital bed. VSIt’s raw, it’s dark, it’s violent, it’s a woman’s gaze in a still very masculine environment and that makes her one of the greatest photographers of the 80s and 90s.
But Nan Goldin comes so close to the abyss that she too plunges: heroin first. And then the OxyContin that his doctor prescribed to treat tendonitis. It is one of the most common painkillers in the USA and she is addicted to it like millions of Americans. We are in 2014, in the middle of what is called the opioid crisis when American doctors began to prescribe more and more painkillers pushed by pharmaceutical companies and their very aggressive promotional campaigns.
Nan Goldin escapes and goes to war against the Sackler family, which markets OxyContin and which has just been found guilty by the American courts. It is a very rich, very powerful family which, thanks to the money from painkillers, offers itself a good reputation in the art world and which is the patron of the greatest museums in the world.
So, Nan Goldin and the members of her association lead actions in front of the Louvre, the Met or the Guggenheim to force them to refuse the money from the merchants of misfortune. Three years ago, the Louvre also renamed a room in the museum that bore Sackler’s name. This fight is told in a film which will be released tomorrow in France at the cinema. His name is All the beauty and the bloodsheda title that sums up the life of the one who wants to remain at 69 years old the bad conscience of America.