It’s a tender, intimate moment that belies the chaotic era in which it was captured. The two women on the beach in Nantucket, Massachusetts, are photographer Nan Goldin (on right) and her partner at the time, the British-born artist Siobhan Liddell. Together, they stare at the lens as though making eyes at a co-conspirator.
If Goldin seems the more relaxed of the two, it’s because she’s known the photographer, David Armstrong, since they were both teenagers at a Massachusetts free school. They wove in and out of each other’s lives over the years, photographing many of the same people, though in markedly different styles.
By 1990, when these photographs were taken, the creative, hard-living scene that had formed around them in New York was in crisis. Goldin’s dear friend Cookie Mueller had diedfrom an Aids-realated illness the previous year. Her on-off relationship with Liddell would soon be permanently off, and in 1991 Goldin left New York for Berlin. Armstrong followed her and their perspectives continued to intertwine.
These contact sheets were among thousands retrieved from a barn in western Massachusetts after Armstrong’s death in 2014. Last year, a few hundred of them, dating from the mid-1970s to the mid-90s, went on display at a show of his work in Zurich alongside a selection of larger prints; now they’ve been gathered into a book. In the afterword, Armstrong’s artist friend Wade Guyton, who co-curated the Zurich show, writes that “for me they have a cinematic quality and reveal something about his method and his relationship to his subjects”.
One thing they reveal, for Guyton, is Armstrong’s brilliant eye for composition. “It’s clear that he got the shot he wanted rather quickly. For all his self-deprecation and casualness, he knew what he was doing.” They also reveal the magnetic bond he had with his subjects – lovers, friends, acquaintances, strangers met by chance.
“Throughout his life, David would focus on one person, and they would glow and become who they wanted to be,” Goldin recalled in a recent Frieze article. That glow can be made out clearly in these Nantucket beach photographs from 35 years ago.
David Armstrong Contacts (2025) by the David Armstrong Archive is published by Mack (£60)