Nan Goldin - Biography

Sex, drugs, disease, violence, and ultimately death - Nan Goldin captures these most intimate, personal moments in her photography. She breaks taboos, without regard for restraint or decency, her images conveying innate trust and emotion. She does not judge or condemn, but rather communicates acceptance, love, and human warmth. Nan Goldin emphasizes that she photographs exclusively those people who are near to her: "If I feel nothing for someone, I can't photograph them."

"If I feel nothing for someone, I can't photograph them."

Goldin lives excessively and chaotically, intensively and in extremes. Her photographs shock and go under the skin. She once made a sensation with her 1980-1986 work "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency", a series of slides showing the everyday lives of her friends that was accompanied by music; these lives were often miserable, marked by drug-use, sleepless nights, and AIDS.

 

Nan Goldin, a leading contemporary photographer, was born in 1953 in Washington, D.C. At 14, after the suicide in Boston, went to New York, and spent several years in Berlin. There, she experienced the city's underground culture and considers this to be one of the happiest times of her life. Today the artist lives in New York and in Paris.

 

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