Nan Goldin

American photographer Nan Goldin (*1953,Washington, D.C.) is known for taking photographs of her intimate circle of friends, members of the cultural underground scene in Boston, New York or Berlin. Working in a documentary style and with the aesthetics of the snapshot, Goldin has made portraits of artists, gays, drag queens, transvestites, drug addicts, as well as self-portraits. Her images show an immediacy and emotional proximity that made them emblematic of the 1980s, the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and of Berlin before the fall of the wall in 1989. Her series of around 800 photographs called The Ballad of Sexual Dependency has evolved since she started it in 1979. Initially shown as a continuous slide projection in a loop, it is considered her most important work, and is presented as a private diary. It includes the photo Käthe in the tub, West Berlin (1984), which is emblematic of Goldin’s way of approaching her models with great sensitivity in intimate moments. For Goldin, the mirror becomes a tool for questioning the self through the other, as is underlined by the title of her first retrospective in 1996 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, I’ll be your mirror.