"My work originally came from the snapshot aesthetic . . . snapshots are taken out of love and to remember people, places, and shared times. They're about creating a history by recording a history." -Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953) was raised in Boston, Massachusetts, where she attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University from which she graduated in 1978. She then moved to New York where she documented her life and community in the downtown scene, photographing herself and her friends, intimates and acquaintances, in a series of indelible images of unflinching, often unflattering candor. It is nearly impossible to discuss Goldin's photographs without referring to their subjects by name, as though the people pictured were one's own family and friends. It is this intimate and raw style for which Goldin has become internationally renowned. Images of drug use, sexuality and gender, physical abuse, domesticity, boredom, love, portraits tender and fierce, were gathered as a sort of visual diary to form her first major body of work, the Ballad of Sexual Dependency. With a relentless focus on the flesh, in close quarters, she has gone on to chronicle the devastation of AIDS, the intimacies and alienations of friends and lovers, parenthood, addiction and recovery, age and loss, and the restless searching of an artist. Goldin has written: “Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavor of life.” Goldin currently lives in New York and Paris and has spent considerable time in Bangkok, Berlin, and Tokyo, creating a major body of work that offers a compelling portrait of our times.