Nan Goldin
“Nan and Brian in Bed” 1981
“Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi” 1991
Interview of Nan Goldin and her work:
Nan Goldin Interview part 1
Nan Goldin Interview part 2
Goldin’s work is most often presented in the form of a slideshow, and has been shown at film festivals; her most famous being a 45 minute show in which 800 pictures are displayed. The main themes of her early pictures are love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality; these frames are usually shot with available light. She has affectionately documented women looking in mirrors, girls in bathrooms and barrooms, drag queens, sexual acts, and the culture of obsession and dependency. The images are viewed like a private journal made public.
Goldin’s work since 1995 has included a wide array of subject matter: collaborative book projects with famed Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki; New York City skylines; uncanny landscapes (notably of people in water); her lover, Siobhan; and babies, parenthood and family life.
Goldin lives in New York and Paris—one reason the French Pompidou Centre mounted a major retrospective of her work in 2002. Her hand was injured in a fall in 2002, and she currently retains less ability to turn it than in the past.
In 2006, her exhibition, Chasing a Ghost, opened in New York. It was the first installation by her to include moving pictures, a fully narrative score, and voiceover, and included the disturbing three-screen slide and video presentation Sisters, Saints, & Sybils. The work involved her sister Barbara’s suicide and how she coped through a numerous amount of images and narratives. Her works are developing more and more into cinemaesque features, exemplifying her graviation towards working with films.[4]
She was presented the 2007 Hasselblad Award [5] on 10 November 2007.[6] She has been represented in America exclusively by Matthew Marks Gallery since 1992 and Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris.