A Quote by 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.
In 2011, 'Yourself in the World,' a book of my writings and interviews, was published in conjunction with a retrospective of my work at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.
There's this thing that publishes pictures of people out and about. So when I go out, I do see pictures of myself. I don't know where those pictures come from - I mean, I don't see the cameras. But I guess I'm just not looking for them.
My first wedding was 15 people at our condo. The second was maybe about a hundred people at this fabulous casino. And you know what? I have almost no pictures of the second one, because I put disposable cameras on the tables, because everyone said, "The best pictures are the most candid! The best pictures are the ones people just take!" So, I put disposable cameras on the tables, and guess what? There were so many kids there that those cameras were stomped on. I had so many pictures of the floor, of people's eyes, of someone's finger.
I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York,' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.
'Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,' the Whitney Museum's 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane, provides moments of buzzy fun, but it'll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters, it may be the whitest, straightest, most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new.
Pictures often sit inside of pictures, but the edges of pictures and objects are rarely subjected to serious challenge; we are presented with distinct, whole pictures and objects.
When I saw the pictures of New York without the World Trade Center, New York looked like a shadow of itself.
Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality. In the cookery pages, the food always looks amazing, right? Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.
My first show at MoMA in New York was pictures of new developments along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains. They were housing developments that were brutal in many ways, that cared almost not a thing for the human beings inside. They were just designed to make money.
So when I looked at pictures and produced my calendar and edited the pictures, it wasn't just about looking at myself and thinking I'm attractive. I try to take myself out of it and get into the whole process of putting it all together.
Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate. Most of the photographs in your paper, unless they are hard news, are lies. Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality... Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.
Norman Rockwell spent his career painting pictures that helped people understand their own feelings...pictures that enriched their own experiences and celebrated their own lives. But the art establishment branded him an 'illustrator', a sentimental one at that. Real artists, they said were doing art for art's sake, not for the sake of the bourgeois public. Real artists were putting swiggles, smears or daubs of paint on the canvas. They were doing 'innovative' and 'creative' work. If they were hideous and grotesque; we know that's what life really is!
You know, I put my little brother in the movies and he's still in the pictures. My mother makes me put him in the pictures.
Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did I wonder whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged my dreams; for they were pictures the like of which I had never seen in real wake-a-day life. They tormented my childhood, making of my dreams a procession of nightmares and a little later convincing me that I was different from my kind, a creature unnatural and accursed.
On things she had to pack before leaving her home in advance of a forest fire, 1996. Childhood pictures and pictures of my life. Do you know how many pictures that is? Not just this life; I have pictures from 13,000 lives.
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