Nan Goldin

American photographer Nan Goldin (b. 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 reveal 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. The photographs Käthe in the tub, West Berlin (1984) and Jimmy Paulette and Tabboo! undressing, NYC (1991) are characteristic of Goldin’s way of approaching her models – with great sensitivity in intimate moments. For Goldin, photography becomes a tool for questioning the self through the other.