Nan Goldin Quotes
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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.
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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.
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My life there[in New York] was almost entirely about gay men for 30 years.
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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.
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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.
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I wasn't there [in U.S] when the city was bombed but it seems to have changed my friends.
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I also met Dominique Sanda, who I always worshipped.
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I remember so many girls when I was growing up who hated the way they looked.
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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.
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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.
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I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.
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I also photographed Maggie Cheung - but these didn't develop into a friendship either.
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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.
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Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.
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If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what.
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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.
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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.
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Now what I like is that other artists know my work and are interested in me or want to collaborate.
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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.
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It's a hideous feeling to go round shopping and even feel like you are a freak.
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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.
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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.
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The camera is as much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex.
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I never thought heroin was very chic.