You might describe Sisters, Saints and Sibyls as Nan Goldin’s origin story. You might also say there are few photo series as haunting. An assemblage of hospital reports, family photographs, and Goldin’s own images, it is a tribute to the photographer’s elder sister Barbara, who was institutionalised when she hit puberty and died by suicide at the age of 18. First screened in Paris in 2004 as one of Goldin’s highly sensory slide shows – set to a blistering soundtrack spanning This Mortal Coil’s Song to the Siren and Johnny Cash’s Hurt – Sisters, Saints and Sibyls is being reissued this month as a photo book, and is no less gut-wrenching for its existence on the printed page.

Goldin documents not just the events leading up to her sister’s death, but the afterlife of her sister's death – the way Barbara’s story is intertwined with Goldin’s own descent into, and emergence from, addiction. “Every suicide kills more than one person,” she writes, cutting to the truth of this very particular kind of bereavement: the shockwaves it sends through families and communities upon impact, the aftershocks that continue to be felt across the years. Those reverberations are innate to the structure of the series, which unfolds through narrative echoes and looping motifs.

The book begins with the myth of the Christian martyr Saint Barbara, who was imprisoned in a tower and later beheaded by her own father for defying her parents’ beliefs. We turn the page onto family portraits and photographs of the Goldins in the 1940s and 50s – picture-perfect impressions of middle-class, midcentury American suburbia. Baby Barbara, born in Washington DC in 1946, is captured laughing and playing, her toothy smile lighting up the black-and-white frames. She is described as “a precocious child” who “shined at school” – “sparkling, bright, neat”. “My sister taught me to watch the sunset. She washed my hair. She used to play Moonlight Sonata at midnight, when she had to babysit for me. She liked to mother me. I was her confidante,” Goldin writes.

As the timeline progresses, images from family photo albums are interspersed with the notes of doctors and caseworkers at the various psychiatric institutions Barbara was committed to throughout her teens. We are told that the “troubles” between Barbara and her parents – her mother specifically – began when she was about 12. Her listed transgressions? Sneaking off to the movie theatre on Saturday afternoons “to make out with unknown, ‘undesirable’ and older boys”, “open defiance”, “sexually provocative behaviour”, “becoming loud and coarse in speech”. And, later, falling in love with a Black boxer, being “attracted to other girls”, being “awkward and ungainly”, “(leaving) her legs unshaven”.

Barbara’s parents first sent her away to a detention centre 3,000 miles from home at the age of 14, then on to hospitals and mental health institutes, all of which she routinely attempted to escape. Revisiting these institutions in the early 2000s, Goldin retraces her sister’s steps, incorporating into the series colour images of dimly lit bedrooms with cuddly toys on the pillows, children’s drawings, and locked rooms – the kind Barbara was committed to on account of her “acting out behaviour”.

We learn that after different doctors’ assessments of Barbara, “they found that there was no diagnosis and that her problem was adjustment to adolescence”, with some professionals even identifying her mother as the one who should be seeking psychiatric help. Even so, Barbara continues to be institutionalised until 1965 when, “on an April afternoon during cherry blossom season”, while on a day pass from a mental health institute, she returns to the family’s home town of Silver Spring in Maryland and takes her own life, the events described in agonising detail.

After Barbara’s death, the focus of the series shifts to the young Nan, who, so convinced she would end up like her sister, ran away from home at 14 and “found (her) own family” among the drag queens of downtown Boston. “At 18, I started to shoot dope, and shoot pictures. That saved my life,” she recounts in sparse yet searing prose, alongside imagery of her hedonistic adolescence – snapshots recognisable from her most celebrated work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. And then: “What I thought was my freedom, became my prison.” Through still lifes and self-portraits, with at-times gruesome clarity, Goldin documents her years-long relationship with drugs, alcohol and self-harm, and her own admission into hospitals and rehab clinics.

Goldin’s unflinching gaze, the way she chronicles her sister’s suffering and her own with equal parts artistry and journalistic precision, is an antidote to the narrative erasure and enforced silence attempted by her parents. “My mother said to the police: ‘Tell the children it was an accident’,” Goldin recalls of her sister’s death. “That was my moment of clarity that defined my life... The tyranny of revisionism even at the moment of greatest anguish. Suburbia. Don’t let the neighbours know. Or even the children. Rewrite history immediately before it can be written.”

It is for this reason that portraits of her mother and father in their old age, towards the end of the book, are so poignant. “To my precious parents… who have struggled bravely to survive for 90 years,” Goldin writes in her dedication, hinting at a journey from anger towards forgiveness – or perhaps a tangle of the two, in the knotty grief that suicide leaves behind.

Goldin has since described her sister’s rebellion as “a starting point for my own”. We bear witness to the self-destructive force of this rebellion, but also its regenerative potential. In thinking about the afterlife of a death, it becomes clear throughout the series how Barbara lives on in Goldin’s art, in her passion, and in her desire to live a bold and honest life. Barbara’s presence is felt in painterly images of moonlight and in tender snapshots of loved ones watching the sunset – just as she’d taught her sister to.

While Sisters, Saints and Sibyls is a historic meditation on the treatment of female mental health in the twentieth century – and the sexist, racist, homophobic undercurrents informing the pathologisation of self-expression, self-discovery, and girlhood back then – it remains, to this day, one of the few artworks addressing suicide and its aftershocks with such acuity. In refusing to look away, Goldin’s work shatters taboos and lifts the shroud of silence even now, and her dedication – “to all our sisters who have committed suicide or been institutionalised for their rebellion” – is as necessary as ever.

Nan Goldin’s Sisters, Saints and Sibyls is published byThames & Hudson and is available from 12 March 2026.