By 1988, Goldin was suffering so badly from drugs and alcohol she decided to go into hospital for detox. They took her camera away and she didn't know what to do. When she was transferred to a halfway house, she got her camera back and started on an intensive series of self-portraits, taken using available light.

These pictures were later to form the basis of another slide show, together with other self-portraits over the years, called 'All by Myself', created in 1995-6, using an Eartha Kitt soundtrack. Some critics have found this too saccharine, too kitschy, but I find this hard to sustain given the searing honesty of some of her pictures. To me, the interplay between the images and the music, with their very different emotional tones and depth, makes this one of her most effective works. It's a piece that makes me warm to Goldin as a person rather than simply admire her as an artist.

Goldin's idea that her photography is very much a way of keeping memories of people alive is at its most explicit in a number of sequences dedicated to the memory of friends who have died from Aids, including 'The Cookie Mueller Portfolio, 1976-90', 'Gotscho + Gilles. Paris, 1992-3' and 'Alf Bold Grid', that dominated her work in the early nineties.

Greer Lankton, (1958-1996), who was born male and had a sex-change operation in 1979 at the age of 21, is the subject of many fine pictures by Goldin. She became well known for dolls and sculptural installations, including a life-sized doll of famed fashion editor and costume curator Diana Vreeland (1903-1989). Greer suffered from alcohol and drug addiction and anorexia. There is a section of pictures of her in 'The Other Side', probably the most effective part of this book.

Goldin has described in an interview how she first heard about Aids in 1981, when she was with Cookie Mueller, Sharon, Cookie's lover, David Armstrong, and a few others. Cookie read an article about a new illness from the 'New York Times' and they all laughed it off, feeling it wouldn't affect them. It was only the following year that their first friend died from it, one of David's lovers.

According to John Waters, who first recognised her potential as a film actress and directed her first film, "Cookie Mueller was a writer, a mother, an outlaw, an actress, a fashion designer, a go-go dancer, a witch-doctor, an art-hag, and above all, a goddess." Born in 1949 in Baltimore, Cookie and Goldin became good friends in 1976. Her photographs include a photograph of Cookie and Vittorio's wedding in New York in 1986. The portfolio is a montage of pictures which follow Cookie from the fullness of her life to her lying in the casket in 1989.

Gilles was her French art dealer. She photographed him with his lover while he was still in good health and then a fine picture of the couple in hospital. Alf Bold was a German friend who also died of Aids.

Of more interest was the work from her collaboration with the Japanese photography Nobuyoshi Araki(see the 'Directory of Photographers' - link in box at right.) Araki is also a prolific photographer, and has produced visual diaries for many years. Goldin went to meet him in 1992, and returned so they could work together on the book 'Tokyo Love' in 1994. Their work is alternates throughout the book, mainly in double pages, but with some sets or four or six pictures. Araki contributes studio portraits of young adolescent girls, girls in their first Tokyo spring.

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