Nan Goldin Quotes

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.

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.

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.

I wasn't there [in U.S] when the city was bombed but it seems to have changed my friends.

I won't show a picture where a person doesn't look beautiful.

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.

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.

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.

[I influenced by ]the work of early [Michelangelo] Antonioni, Orson Welles and [Carlo] Pasolini, I love [Nicolas Jack] Roeg's film "Performance".

I don't think of Maria Schneider like idol anymore, because I worshipped her when I was young.

It's so rare to see a woman's sexuality, real female sexuality, either in the shows or in the clothes.

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.

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.

I also photographed Maggie Cheung - but these didn't develop into a friendship either.

No Jews have our own guilt, that's why we have psychiatrists - the Jewish version of a priest.

[John] Cassavetes, "Killing of a Chinese Booker", "Opening Night" are my favourites.

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.

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.

The things that I look at include Renaissance art. I'm obsessed with churches and paintings of saints.

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.

My work is received more intelligently in Europe.

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.

I don't even like photography at all. I'm just doing photography until I can do something better.

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.

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.

If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what.

I never courted that but it's nice when it's people you respect and they respect your work. It's thrilling.

I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.

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.

Stella McCartney is [my] big fan.

Gena Rowlands is fabulous.

One of my assistants, a British man, says I should find a platform for [cosmetic industry]. Meanwhile I wear make-up.

I also met Dominique Sanda, who I always worshipped.

I think the wrong things are kept private

I don't think I am going to do pictures which are anything like Renaissance art.

Usually people just do their own work. But I want to deal with the place and what it means to show in a mental hospital.

I had my first museum showing of my slide show in Rotterdam, in 1983. I love Rotterdam. I love harbour cities in general.

My life is more important. At this point in my life I'm alone. I don't think about it a lot.

I start to paint my walls. And I'm heavily influenced by films.

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.

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.

Now what I like is that other artists know my work and are interested in me or want to collaborate.

I have very healthy strong relationships with women.

I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.

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.

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

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.

I've been alone for about eight years and it doesn't bother me.