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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
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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
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I shot for French and British Vogue. The British Vogue one featured clothes by Chloe and was shot at Highgate and the John Soane Museum. It came out much better in my opinion. I only did one day and was working with my own make-up and hair people and a model who I've known for years.
Nan Goldin
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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
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I wasn't there [in U.S] when the city was bombed but it seems to have changed my friends.
Nan Goldin
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My life there[in New York] was almost entirely about gay men for 30 years.
Nan Goldin
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I also met Dominique Sanda, who I always worshipped.
Nan Goldin
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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
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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
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I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.
Nan Goldin
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If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what.
Nan Goldin
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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
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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
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I remember so many girls when I was growing up who hated the way they looked.
Nan Goldin
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I also photographed Maggie Cheung - but these didn't develop into a friendship either.
Nan Goldin
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Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.
Nan Goldin
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In a way, it [my style] is an homage. But I didn't really know about it at first. But then when I started living in Berlin in the early '90s, I started getting ID and Dazed and Confused. I was shocked how close things were to my work.
Nan Goldin
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Now what I like is that other artists know my work and are interested in me or want to collaborate.
Nan Goldin
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One of my assistants, a British man, says I should find a platform for [cosmetic industry]. Meanwhile I wear make-up.
Nan Goldin
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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.
Nan Goldin
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It's a hideous feeling to go round shopping and even feel like you are a freak.
Nan Goldin
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It's so rare to see a woman's sexuality, real female sexuality, either in the shows or in the clothes.
Nan Goldin
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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
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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.
Nan Goldin
