Nan Goldin

Artist biography:

Born: 1953, Washington DC

Nan Goldin grew up in Boston. After a traumatic family event in 1965, she began to use photography as a way to mark her life, and memories, permanently. Her camera became a journalistic means of recording history.

Together with friends she explored the aesthetics of fashion photography and got in contact with the transvestite and cross-dresser scene in Boston. During the early 1970s she strove for a documentary objective depiction of these people, whom she admired for their special confidence.

She went on to study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Tufts University in Boston. Her first exhibition followed in 1974, 'Image Works' at the university in Cambridge. After graduating in 1977, she moved to New York, where her circle of friends, a surrogate family to her, became her subject in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The loss of several friends due to AIDS-related infections over the following years resulted in Goldin's return to the depiction of other people at the beginning of the 1990s. She spent a year in Berlin following an invitation of the DAAD and exhibited together with her artist colleagues as part of the new 'Boston School' at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1995. One year later the Whitney Museum of American Art organised a retrospective exhibition. Her most recent exhibition was in 2006 at the Obra Grafica y Seriada, Galeria Argenta, Valencia, Spain.

Nan Goldin lives and works in New York.