Quotes by Nan Goldin - Page 2

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.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Country
Firsts
Said
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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.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Important
Memories
Photograph
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I'm very much interested in water and women in water. I've been photographing that for years although I didn't really know it at the time.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Knows
Water
Years
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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 / Photographer
America
Hate
Healthy
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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.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Chiefs
Influence
Memories
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Plastic surgery is distressingly popular and I feel that the fashion industry has killed tens of thousands of women over the years from anorexia.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Anorexia
Fashion
Years
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[I influenced by ]the work of early [Michelangelo] Antonioni, Orson Welles and [Carlo] Pasolini, I love [Nicolas Jack] Roeg's film "Performance".
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Film
Performances
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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.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Cute
Smile
Amsterdam
Real
Too Much
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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.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Art
Catholic
Children
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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 / Photographer
Clothes
Done
Fashion
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Actually, I think what is being shown as beauty in fashion magazines right now has become particularly ugly. This kind of straight, blonde very conservative.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Blonde
Fashion
Thinking
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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 / Photographer
Desire
People
Want
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I'm not ashamed of my body and you know everything in the fashion world, if I was vulnerable to it, could drive me crazy. I think it produces so much self-hatred.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Crazy
Fashion
Thinking
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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.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Giving
People
Thinking
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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.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Running
Mean
Thinking
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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.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Beautiful
Mean
Thinking
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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.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Female
Thinking
Want
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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 / Photographer
Light
Night
Taken
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When I started photographing my boyfriend of years ago, Brian, I realised I had no right to photograph other people having sex if I wasn't prepared to take them of myself too
Nan Goldin / Photographer
People
Sex
Years
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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.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Cameras
Different
Looks
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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.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Age
Cameras
Real
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I never, never photograph someone getting high to sell clothes. I was called, at some point, the person responsible for "heroin chic". I didn't have anything to do with "heroin chic".
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Clothes
Getting High
Heroin
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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.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Character
Faces
Growing Up
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That's where I got the idea to paint the walls of the gallery with varied colours [at the Whitechapel show]. I tried to figure out how all these Renaissance paintings manage to work together.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Ideas
Wall
Working Together
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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.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Broken
Self
Years
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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.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Enough
Lost
Memories
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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 / Photographer
Cameras
Care
Moments
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At the same time as the UK Vogue one, I did a shoot that took about 40 days of friends and people I admired in Paris, for French Vogue. This is how I met Maria Schneider in June and which began our friendship.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
June
Paris
People
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Some people have become [in U.S] a lot more conservative but I can't really speak about that because I wasn't there. I feel compassion for their pain but it distresses me to see them all become more patriotic.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Compassion
Pain
Patriotic
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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 / Photographer
Cameras
People
Would Be
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[I want to] refuting the whole idea that there is only one way to look; that women have to be so skinny to look good; that they have to be 12 years old and wearing clothes that only women in their 30s and 40s can afford.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Clothes
Ideas
Years
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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 / Photographer
Confused
Style
Way
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Yes, I need to be fed but the need to be loved by friends has been as important to me than any lover I've had all my life. This is part of the reasons that my lovers don't stay because they are jealous of how much I care about my friends.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Jealous
Care
Important
Needs
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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.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Art
New York
Mean
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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 / Photographer
Believe
Crazy
Lying
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I think it's obscene that many people are starving to death from anorexia. It's been said many times, it's trite. But when so much evil is going on against, for example the Afghani people, where women are being so oppressed that a woman's body is a battlefield.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Evil
People
Thinking
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I used to live with Teri Toye in the '80s - a really gorgeous transsexual. She won Girl of the Year in 1986 [I think] as a Chanel model and she introduced this whole way of slinky, slow-motion modeling. It was amazing that the girl of the year was actually born male.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Girl
Thinking
Years
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In '83 I started travelling round Europe with my slide show. It wasn't until I moved to Europe and got accepted in a big way in Berlin in the '90s that I got acceptance by the big art world in New York. I didn't really get to be known, or in the market, til '93 in New York.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Art
New York
Acceptance
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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 / Photographer
Clothes
Hair
Museums
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I know somewhat about Kate [Moss who featured in the Vogue spread]. I always thought that Kate's look had come from my old friend Siobhan Liddell and some of her friends because they dressed like that about ten years ago. Unconsciously, and right after that, that whole look sort of came out.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Moss
Old Friends
Years
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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 / Photographer
Ideas
Paris
Real
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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 / Photographer
House
Impact
Years
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One of the fashion things I ever did was for Helmut Lang for Visionaire magazine and I used people from all genders. People from the age of 18 - like James King - to people like my friend Sharon [Stone] who's about 50 or older. People of all different shapes and literally all different genders and my boyfriend at the time and his daughter who was 11.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Daughter
Kings
Fashion
People
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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 / Photographer
Imperfection
Self
Things I Love
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I was recently interviewed for radio in relation to the "Thanksgiving" show [2001] at the Saatchi gallery that I was part of. The interviewer said that people in London were very disturbed that I showed a picture of myself battered ("Nan One Month after Being Battered", 1984) and they thought that I set it up. I was accused of deliberately putting on a wig for that particular picture.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
People
Radio
Wigs
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My work has been about making a record of my life that no one can revise. I photograph myself in times of trouble or change in order to find the ground to stand on in the change. I was coming out of a melancholic phase. This was taken when I was traveling extensively, on the road from hotel to hotel. You get displaced, and then taking self-portraits becomes a way of hanging on to yourself.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Order
Self
Taken
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A lot of people seem to think that art or photography is about the way things look, or the surface of things. That's not what it's about for me. It's really about relationships and feelings...it's really hard for me to do commercial work because people kind of want me to do a Nan Goldin. They don't understand that it's not about a style or a look or a setup. It's about emotional obsession and empathy.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Art
Emotional
Photography
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The only time this happened to me before was in Jil Sander in Berlin where they said, "We have nothing that will fit you." I said, "Yes, you do." And I found something great. This happens to me in Paris again and again and again. They don't carry anything over size 40 which is nothing, because I wear a size 42 or 44 but that's hard to find in Paris among the designer clothes. All stores are like that.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Berlin
Designer Clothes
Paris
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There are ways of angling the camera. I don't just use a tripod. The only time I did that was in '88 when I first came out of detox, I spent every day doing self-portraits to fit back into my own skin. I didn't know what the world looked like - what I looked like - so in order to fit back into myself, I took self-portraits everyday to give myself courage and to fit the pieces back together. I used a tripod then.
Nan Goldin / Photographer
Giving
Order
Self
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