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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

I have very healthy strong relationships with women.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No Jews have our own guilt, that's why we have psychiatrists - the Jewish version of a priest.

I have the freedom of seeing it [churches and paintings of saints] with a non-Catholic eye without the guilt.

The things that I look at include Renaissance art. I'm obsessed with churches and paintings of saints.

I don't know if Yves St Laurent likes my work but Pierre Bergé does.

In Paris now, when I walk into stores and the shopgirls literally say to me every time, "We don't have anything in your size".

I never courted that but it's nice when it's people you respect and they respect your work. It's thrilling.

One of my assistants, a British man, says I should find a platform for [cosmetic industry]. Meanwhile I wear make-up.

American magazines are becoming very patriotic beyond belief to the point that I can't live there any more.

I had said that when the first Bush got elected that I would leave the country. And when the second Bush wasn't even elected properly.

I wasn't there [in U.S] when the city was bombed but it seems to have changed my friends.

I love all the Hollywood women. I saw all the films when I was a teenager. Jack Smith's "Flaming Creatures".

I'm very flattered when people I respect like my work. It's like a dream of a little kid when somebody I idolised likes my work.

[I influenced by ]the work of early [Michelangelo] Antonioni, Orson Welles and [Carlo] Pasolini, I love [Nicolas Jack] Roeg's film "Performance".

In America, more than half the population are overweight. It's not healthy and I'm not proud of that but I don't hate having a woman's body.

I don't think of Maria Schneider like idol anymore, because I worshipped her when I was young.

The only time I went out was to go to bars at night and all the pictures were taken with a flash because there was no light at all. However now I'm very interested in light.