Nan Goldin Quotes

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.

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.

It's a hideous feeling to go round shopping and even feel like you are a freak.

I'm very flattered when people I respect like my work. It's like a dream of a little kid when somebody I idolised likes my work.

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.

Each time I spend with Stella McCartney, I like her better. So I was excited to be asked by her.

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.

She has that kind of baby face, a very young face. So I was interested in working with Kate [Moss].

The main thing that I want to say is that I don't think women are at their most beautiful in their adolescence or in their early 20s.

One of the major things I really want to work on now is female rage because that's not dealt with at all - and I have a lot of it.

I love all the Hollywood women. I saw all the films when I was a teenager. Jack Smith's "Flaming Creatures".

I like Stella [McCartney] a lot - she's a very open and warm person. I don't particularly want to know about her background.

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.

The idea that a fashion photograph could make you cry doesn't happen. And I'm proud to say that my slideshows can make people cry.

I remember so many girls when I was growing up who hated the way they looked.

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.

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.

I have the freedom of seeing it [churches and paintings of saints] with a non-Catholic eye without the guilt.

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.

American magazines are becoming very patriotic beyond belief to the point that I can't live there any more.

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.

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.

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".

The camera is as much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex.

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.

Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.

I never read theory. I think that was to my benefit.

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.

No place could be less sympathetic to my politics than America.

The thing that drives me most crazy in the world is not to be believed.

My life there[in New York] was almost entirely about gay men for 30 years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I never thought heroin was very chic.

Plastic surgery is distressingly popular and I feel that the fashion industry has killed tens of thousands of women over the years from anorexia.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

In Paris now, when I walk into stores and the shopgirls literally say to me every time, "We don't have anything in your size".

If I do continue to do fashion, I would want to radicalise it.

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.

I don't know if Yves St Laurent likes my work but Pierre Bergé does.