“For me it is not a detachment to take a picture” says Nan Goldin, the American photographer and activist whose work from the 1970s and 80s offers a profoundly intimate look at LGBTQ+ subcultures. “It’s a way of touching somebody—it’s a caress, I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.” Her defining series, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” began as a slideshow screened at the clubs and bars Goldin frequented, and evolved into a nationally-lauded distillation of 126 photographs, now a permanent part of the National Gallery’s archives. Goldin presents an unflinching portrait of post-Stonewall New York: the drug culture ravaging New York’s Bowery neighborhood, the emergence of no wave music and art, and the horror of the AIDs epidemic. Themes of friendship, romance, and intimacy weave through. —Nyla Gilstrap