Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Nan Goldin

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American photographer Nan Goldin.

Last updated on November 21, 2024.

Nancy Goldin is an American photographer and activist. Her work often explores LGBT subcultures, moments of intimacy, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the opioid epidemic. Her most notable work is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), a slide show, which documents the post-Stonewall gay subculture and Goldin's family and friends. She is a founding member of the an advocacy group P.A.I.N.. She lives and works in New York City, Berlin, and Paris.

American - Photographer | Born: September 12, 1953

Source: Wikipedia

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.

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

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

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

I remember so many girls when I was growing up who hated the way they looked.

Nan Goldin

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

Nan Goldin

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

Nan Goldin

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

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

I think the wrong things are kept private

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

I never thought heroin was very chic.

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

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

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

Actually, I think what is being shown as beauty in fashion magazines right now has become particularly ugly. This kind of straight, blonde very conservative.

Nan Goldin

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

Nan Goldin

It's a hideous feeling to go round shopping and even feel like you are a freak.

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

If I say something honestly, generally, I am being completely honest and don't tell me I am lying. It drives me crazy to be told I set up my pictures. How does it benefit me to lie? I guess they are afraid to believe it and are afraid to look at it.

Nan Goldin

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

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

If I do continue to do fashion, I would want to radicalise it.

Nan Goldin

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

Nan Goldin

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

Nan Goldin

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

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

I was recently interviewed for radio in relation to the "Thanksgiving" show [2001] at the Saatchi gallery that I was part of. The interviewer said that people in London were very disturbed that I showed a picture of myself battered ("Nan One Month after Being Battered", 1984) and they thought that I set it up. I was accused of deliberately putting on a wig for that particular picture.

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

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

Nan Goldin

I'm not ashamed of my body and you know everything in the fashion world, if I was vulnerable to it, could drive me crazy. I think it produces so much self-hatred.

Nan Goldin

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

Nan Goldin

I have very healthy strong relationships with women.

Nan Goldin

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

Nan Goldin

When I put my big retrospective together in '96 [for the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York], I saw that there were all these pictures of people inside looking out. All these pictures of women in water and mirrors. I don't know what it means.

Nan Goldin

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

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

[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.

Nan Goldin

I won't show a picture where a person doesn't look beautiful.

Nan Goldin

I've got really prolific since I moved to Paris where I am living permanently, for the rest of my life, until I find another idea. I have really close women friends here: Valerie, Raymonde, not Joana so much, Maria Schneider, who was always a real heroine of mine who and has now become a close friend.

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

I have no ambivalence about myself wearing make-up or designer clothes but I have an enormous ambivalence about what the fashion world has done to women.

Nan Goldin

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

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

Now what I like is that other artists know my work and are interested in me or want to collaborate.

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

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

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

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.

Nan Goldin

When I started photographing my boyfriend of years ago, Brian, I realised I had no right to photograph other people having sex if I wasn't prepared to take them of myself too

Nan Goldin

Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Nan Goldin

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