Nan Goldin’s exhibition at the Grand Palais first strikes me for something that goes far beyond the beauty of each individual image. This is not a sequence of photographs to be admired one by one, as in a more traditional hanging. It feels more like a flow, a breath, a living material. And that is exactly where the emotion comes from: in the way everything holds together.
I loved this exhibition for that reason. Seen on their own, the images do not always seek spectacular impact or formal elegance in the usual sense. Some are rough, intimate, almost ordinary at first glance. But placed in sequence, they gain incredible strength. They speak less of isolated moments than of a life in motion, of memory unfolding, of vulnerability embraced.
What moved me especially was the role of the 1970s soundtracks in each slideshow. They do not simply accompany the images: they carry them, restart them, give them their emotional temperature. Of course, they anchor the work in a period, but more importantly, they create a feeling. We are not just looking at photographs; we are stepping into an atmosphere, into an era lived from the inside, with its desires, wounds, excesses, and silences.
Nan Goldin understands something rare: how to turn a fragmentary body of work into a total narrative form. Each image keeps its own singularity, but it is their sequence, their rhythm, and their music that create the real force of the work. You leave with the feeling of having crossed not a photo exhibition, but a world.
What matters most, in the end, is not aesthetics in the cold sense of the word. It is emotional density. The accuracy of faces, bodies, relationships. The way the images preserve traces of life without freezing them. And the music, almost always just right, which keeps the whole thing from tipping into nostalgia in the wrong sense of the word.
Nan Goldin at the Grand Palais shows very clearly that an exhibition can be stronger than the sum of its works. That is rare. And that is probably why this exhibition stays with you long after you leave.
Grégory Herpe
PS: Nan Goldin has specifically asked that no images from this exhibition be published. I will therefore respect her request.
Nan Goldin This Will Not End Well
18 March- 21 June 2026
Auditorium Alexandre III, Grand Palais, Paris – France
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