“A Hand to Your Darkness”

Abstract

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is Poitras’s first portrait of a female subject. In it for the first time she models forms of feminist attention to another woman, a woman artist, speaking and listening to her. Through openness to Goldin’s susceptibility, experimentation, pleasure, and suffering, Poitras addresses trauma and its relation to activism. In their collaboration, Goldin brings the visual sublime as well as overt sensuality into Poitras’s purview, releasing the eros and pathos that have always been part of her work. In turn, Poitras makes possible, and essential, a full portrait of Nan Goldin as activist.