For over five decades, the photographer Nan Goldin has been creating unforgettable images that traffic in the poetics of the personal. Friends, lovers and ambiguous others star in her intimate and yet operatic diaries of love, loss and longing. More than any other artist of her stature, Goldin has leveraged her success to call out the greed and inhumanity of the powerful, from the US government’s slow-motion response to the AIDS crisis that killed so many of her friends in the 1980s to the profiteering of Big Pharma and the overdose epidemic it unleashed. (Goldin’s journey as an artist and advocate is the subject of Laura Poitras’s 2022 documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.) The grandchild of Ashkenazi Jews from Poland, Goldin has spent the past two years consumed by the obliteration of Gaza and its people. She has protested while many of her peers have remained conspicuously mute; her exemplary words and actions feature heavily in her friend David Velasco’s recent Equator essay, “How Gaza Broke the Art World”. Earlier this year, she and her editor David Sherman began stitching together videos from Palestine – scenes of normalcy and atrocity, both – to produce Gaza, a tapestry of pain and beauty. She has generously shared the result with us. The images presented here make any number of demands on the viewer. But perhaps above all, they insist: Do not look away.

– Negar Azimi

I have no more words. This is my way of speaking out.

This piece is a work in progress that stands as a record of what has consumed me for the last two years: the need to bear witness.

This is the first genocide unfolding in real time on our phones and it is unbearable. The footage in this film is from friends who visited Palestine, the brave journalists on the ground, most of whom have been targeted, and the people living it. It remains silent because music is too directive and without sound people are forced to look more intently. The film loops because what it is showing is constantly repeating. It remains unfinished because it is not over.

It’s not the time for denial and amnesia.

– Nan Goldin