The Kiss That Gripped My Heart: Discovering Nan Goldin’s “Gilles and Gotscho”

A photograph of love, loss, and the uncomfortable truth we try to forget

I went to visit the Castello di Rivoli Gallery, as I often do when I need to reconnect with something that feels true. I was wandering through the exhibition, letting the art speak, or not speak, when I came across a photograph titled “Gilles and Gotscho Embracing, Paris.”

Nan Goldin - Gilles and Gotscho Embracing

I stopped.

What is this?

I already knew Nan Goldin. Her name. Her work. Her raw, unfiltered gaze. But this image felt different. I didn’t move for a while. And when I did, something stayed behind, pulling me back. I tried to continue with the exhibition, but my interest in the other artworks had started to dim. I felt as though they were suddenly quieter, fainter. My mind kept drifting back to that photograph. So I returned. Again and again.

There was something in it, something undeniable. It wasn’t just the composition or the emotion. It was the sense that this image had a weight. That it was carrying something I wasn’t yet able to name. But it had already reached me. Maybe even pierced me. And I knew I couldn’t leave it there.

Later that same day, I began researching. I needed to understand the story behind what I’d seen. That’s when I discovered the deeply moving project “Gilles and Gotscho”, a series of photographs by Nan Goldin that document the life, and death, of Gilles Dusein, a Parisian gallerist who supported Goldin’s work, and his partner, Gotscho.

Goldin followed the couple for over a year. What began as a portrait of two men in love gradually became an intimate testimony of illness and loss. Gilles was living with AIDS, and as his condition worsened, Goldin kept photographing, not as a voyeur, not as an outsider, but as someone inside the moment, holding it, honoring it.

Nan Goldin - Gotscho kissing Gilles

Among the most powerful images is “
Gotscho Kissing Gilles”, taken just after Gilles’s death. In the photo, Gotscho leans over his lifeless partner, pressing one last kiss to his face.

There is no spectacle. No dramatization.

Only love. Devotion. Finality.

And that one image gripped my heart. It felt as though time had paused around it. In its quiet, it said everything: the unbearable tenderness of farewell, the courage of staying until the end, the aching permanence of absence.

Nan Goldin once said:

“I thought I would never lose anyone if I photographed them enough.”

But she did lose them. Yet through her lens, she gifted us moments that resist erasure. Her photographs are not about aestheticizing tragedy, they’re about refusing to look away. In “Gotscho Kissing Gilles”, there is no filter between the viewer and the truth. We are not offered metaphors. We are shown the rawness of love at the threshold of death.

At the time this photo was taken, 1992, the world still barely understood AIDS. The stigma was suffocating. Kissing someone with HIV was feared, judged, avoided. Much like, in recent years, the fear of touching someone with COVID. But here, we see a man, Gotscho, kissing his partner, unafraid. Not because it is safe. But because it is human. Necessary. Sacred.

Nan Goldin - Gilles' Hospital

And then it hit me, why this image impacted me so deeply.

We live with the illusion of eternity. We pursue happiness as if it's permanent, as if we're immune to the truths of mortality. But this photograph, just one frame, shatters that illusion. It reminds us that life is fragile. That the people we love can vanish. That grief is not cinematic—it's real, intimate, messy.

Yet in our daily lives, we subconsciously resist this truth. We tell ourselves that if pain isn’t close, it can’t touch us. If it happens to someone else, we’ve survived. And on that thin thread, we justify our indifference. We pity others for a moment and then carry on. We look away. We choose not to see.

But Nan Goldin never looked away.

Nan Goldin - Gilles and Gotscho Project

And she won’t let us either.

This image is more than a memory, it’s a mirror. A confrontation. A call.

It demands that we feel. That we reflect. That we remember that we are not exempt.

What Goldin has done through “Gilles and Gotscho” is offer the kind of witnessing that our world so often lacks. She has placed grief and love, in their most human form, into the public eye, and asked us not just to feel compassion, but to respond with consciousness. Because we are all part of this world, and the suffering of others, even if not our own, is still ours to bear.

That day at Castello di Rivoli, I didn’t just see a photograph.

I saw a truth I had been avoiding.

And I will never forget it.