PROVIDENCE, RI.- Photographer Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953) has developed a brutally honest and provocative body of work. Fantastic Tales: Photography of Nan Goldin, comprises a select grouping of 26 intimate photographs from the past 30 years drawn from the collection of David and Gerry Pincus. It includes a reworking of Goldin's best-known piece, the voluminous, open-ended slide show titled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency which was begun in the late 1970s as a means of preserving memories of the artist's close-knit circle of friends on the Lower East Side. In this new 27-print grid of photographs created in 1995, Goldin sequenced the photographs with carefully designed juxtapositions and congruencies honed from years of producing slide shows in New York City clubs. Together, the images possess narrative qualities that allow them to be read in many ways.

This exhibition's highly edited group of photographs taken between 1972 and 2001 confirms what collectors, curators and critics have long known about Goldin; that the scope of her work extends well beyond the East Village slide performance that launched her career. Goldin has recorded life as it presents itself, sometimes beautifully sweet and sometimes uncomfortably raw. She has attained international recognition over the last three decades, documenting what some might call outsiders, but her subjects are the bohemian friends she knows as her family. As an active participant in the world she documents, she is able to capture her subjects with poignant and searing honesty and remarkable naturalism. The artist has made tender, highly biographical portraits of women regarding themselves in mirrors, girls in bathrooms and barrooms, drag queens, people making love, and the culture of addiction. Simply stated, Goldin's work represents a diary made public exploring the nature of intimacy and what the artist has termed "the struggle between autonomy and dependency."

The exhibition, organized by the Palmer Museum of Art at Pennsylvania State University was presented there in late 2005 and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in early 2006. Her work has been the subject of many exhibitions in this country and abroad including a major touring retrospective exhibition organized by the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London and The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2001 which traveled throughout Europe. A major retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1997. She is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.

The exhibition was organized by the Palmer Museum of Art at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. Fantastic Tales was on view at Palmer Museum of art in late 2005 and at the Academy in early 2006. This is the first New England venue to present this exhibition.