Nan Goldin Cancels New York Times Project Over Newspaper’s ‘Complicity with Israel’

The photographer Nan Goldin said on Thursday that she had called off a project for the New York Times Magazine, accusing the newspaper of a pro-Israel bias in its reporting on Gaza.

“Yesterday, I canceled a big job with the New York Times Sunday magazine — a cover shoot of a musician I admire — because of the NYT’s reporting on the war on Gaza, which shows complicity with Israel,” she wrote on Instagram. “For what they report and don’t report, and how they question the veracity of anything Palestinians say.”

She tagged Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), a group of journalists, critics, and more that have “committed to solidarity and the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people,” according to a description on its website, which accuses the New York Times’s editorial board and others of having created a “perversion of meaning” since the October 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,400 Israelis and involved the taking of around 200 hostages.

Following that attack, Israel has launched airstrikes on Gaza, killing more than 10,000 people there, according to the local health ministry. The writers’ group linked out to a regularly updated page by the Committee to Protect Journalists that collects the names of journalists who have been killed during the conflict since October 7; the page now lists around 40 names.

On her Instagram story, Goldin alluded to these killings, writing, “I respect the NYT journalists who are on the ground reporting the reality. I mourn the dozens of Palestinian journalists who have been targeted and killed in the last weeks. As long as the people of Gaza are screaming, we need to yell louder so they can hear us, no matter who attempts to silence us.”

A New York Times spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Goldin posted her story less than a week after Jazmine Hughes, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, resigned from her post after having signed the WAWOG petition. Jake Silverstein, editor of the New York Times Magazine, said doing so was “a clear violation of The Times’s policy on public protest,” pointing out that Hughes had also signed another letter denouncing the newspaper’s reporting on transgender issues.

The photographer herself was among the signatories of that letter alongside Hughes. Goldin had also signed an open letter published by Artforum and others that called for a ceasefire in Gaza and Palestinian liberation. She criticized that magazine for firing its editor, David Velasco, after the publication of the letter, telling the New York Times, “I have never lived through a more chilling period.”