Detail

Nan Goldin’s photographs are based on relationships and not on observations. Her motifs are her friends, lovers, people close to her, her beloved surrogate family, her clan. This US American photographs things she knows—interior views of transgender nightlife and gay and lesbian subcultures in New York as quick images from an intensive life in the limelight. Her photos are snapshots, with no glossy aesthetics. They show an uncompromised view of life in the world of drugs and on the margins of society—things as they really are, tough and dirty. Goldin blurs the borders between the public and the private, opens up spaces to view that would otherwise remain hidden away. Her photos are based on maximum proximity and intimacy. They document sexual desire, existential crises, drug addiction, and violence. They also show moments of liberation from convention, like those that arise when gender definitions are fluid. For Goldin, these photographs are a visual diary, a way of working against forgetting and loss. The effects of AIDS on her circle of friends from the mid-1980s makes this form of memory forever shocking and present. With the immediacy and honesty of her motifs and the direct snapshot quality of her pictures, Nan Goldin proved to be highly influential on the aesthetics of artistic photography in the 1980s. Her influence is also still felt today, particularly in fashion photography.