Nan Goldin Quotes

I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.

My desire is to preserve the sense of people’s lives, to endow them with the strength and beauty I see in them. I want the people in my pictures to stare back.

A lot of people seem to think that art or photography is about the way things look, or the surface of things. That's not what it's about for me. It's really about relationships and feelings...it's really hard for me to do commercial work because people kind of want me to do a Nan Goldin. They don't understand that it's not about a style or a look or a setup. It's about emotional obsession and empathy.

For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It's a way of touching somebody - it's a caress… I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.

I always thought if I photographed anyone or anything enough, I would never lose the person, I would never lose the memory, I would never lose the place. But the pictures show me how much I've lost.

Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.

My work has been about making a record of my life that no one can revise. I photograph myself in times of trouble or change in order to find the ground to stand on in the change. I was coming out of a melancholic phase. This was taken when I was traveling extensively, on the road from hotel to hotel. You get displaced, and then taking self-portraits becomes a way of hanging on to yourself.

I knew from a very early age, that what I saw on tv had nothing to do with real life. So I wanted to make a record of real life. That included having a camera with me at all times.

The camera is as much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex.

I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.

My work is mostly about memory. It is very important to me that everybody that I have been close to in my life I make photographs of them.

I think the wrong things are kept private

My work shows the beauty in so many different kinds of people because I never photograph anyone who I don't think is beautiful. I never take an intentionally mean picture.

I usually work really instinctively and it's afterwards that I think about what it means. I don't know consciously that I have these themes that run through my work.

If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what.

I'm very influenced by a lot of things, but my chief influence is my friends and what I see and what I feel and my own experiences and memory.

The complete disregard for the camera's presence indicates its complete saturation in their lives. The subject neither notices nor seems to care that someone has been invited into their private moment.

You know it's said that you make your own face. So you don't really have a face until you are 30 or your mid-20s. When you are starting to grow up and show your character in your face.

It's so rare to see a woman's sexuality, real female sexuality, either in the shows or in the clothes.

There are ways of angling the camera. I don't just use a tripod. The only time I did that was in '88 when I first came out of detox, I spent every day doing self-portraits to fit back into my own skin. I didn't know what the world looked like - what I looked like - so in order to fit back into myself, I took self-portraits everyday to give myself courage and to fit the pieces back together. I used a tripod then.

There are days when everyone in the world looks like a Diane Arbus to me. She's a genius but her work is completely different to mine. But on those days I don't use my camera.

The main thing that I want to say is that I don't think women are at their most beautiful in their adolescence or in their early 20s.

Of course I was wearing make-up, I never went anywhere without red lipstick for 25 years! It was a form of self-preservation for me to continue to wear lipstick even though my face was broken.

I don't even like photography at all. I'm just doing photography until I can do something better.

I like it [Rotterdam] much better than Amsterdam which is too much like a postcard. It's too cute for me. Rotterdam is more real, it's got a stomach.

Yes, I need to be fed but the need to be loved by friends has been as important to me than any lover I've had all my life. This is part of the reasons that my lovers don't stay because they are jealous of how much I care about my friends.

Plastic surgery is distressingly popular and I feel that the fashion industry has killed tens of thousands of women over the years from anorexia.

I never read theory. I think that was to my benefit.

I think it killed my sister as the times she was living in were so conformist. This is a subject I really want to deal with. I want to start making films about female rage.

I've become really interested in the landscape but not as landscape but more as it relates to mood and how we live and how the outside impacts on the inside. I didn't really look at the outside world during the years I was photographing the Ballad as I was locked inside my house and I lived totally inside.

I had my first museum showing of my slide show in Rotterdam, in 1983. I love Rotterdam. I love harbour cities in general.

One of the major things I really want to work on now is female rage because that's not dealt with at all - and I have a lot of it.

No place could be less sympathetic to my politics than America.

I feel like if I started to use it [camera] that way, it would be like a sin almost. I never show people ugly pictures I take of them. I usually destroy them. So even if I like it, and they don't, it doesn't get shown.

I never, never photograph someone getting high to sell clothes. I was called, at some point, the person responsible for "heroin chic". I didn't have anything to do with "heroin chic".

I have very healthy strong relationships with women.

I did [heroin] maybe when I was 18 but I got over that pretty quickly.

[I want to] refuting the whole idea that there is only one way to look; that women have to be so skinny to look good; that they have to be 12 years old and wearing clothes that only women in their 30s and 40s can afford.

I think it's obscene that many people are starving to death from anorexia. It's been said many times, it's trite. But when so much evil is going on against, for example the Afghani people, where women are being so oppressed that a woman's body is a battlefield.

I've been alone for about eight years and it doesn't bother me.

Each time I spend with Stella McCartney, I like her better. So I was excited to be asked by her.

The thing that drives me most crazy in the world is not to be believed.

I used to live with Teri Toye in the '80s - a really gorgeous transsexual. She won Girl of the Year in 1986 [I think] as a Chanel model and she introduced this whole way of slinky, slow-motion modeling. It was amazing that the girl of the year was actually born male.

I know somewhat about Kate [Moss who featured in the Vogue spread]. I always thought that Kate's look had come from my old friend Siobhan Liddell and some of her friends because they dressed like that about ten years ago. Unconsciously, and right after that, that whole look sort of came out.

My life there[in New York] was almost entirely about gay men for 30 years.

The idea that a fashion photograph could make you cry doesn't happen. And I'm proud to say that my slideshows can make people cry.

One of the things I love so much about Valerie [Belin] is that she inhabits her body so completely. She has no self-consciousness about having stretch marks or having given birth. It's just so amazing that she has nothing to hide. Whereas all these other women see every little - supposed - imperfection - anything irregular is seen as an imperfection.

As a non-Catholic, and since I was a child, I have been obsessed with the ritual and the beauty of Catholic art. I look at Renaissance art all the time.

My life is more important. At this point in my life I'm alone. I don't think about it a lot.

I don't think I am going to do pictures which are anything like Renaissance art.