Nan Goldin
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Thinking
Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Memories
My work has been about making a record of my life that no one can revise. I photograph myself in times of trouble or change in order to find the ground to stand on in the change. I was coming out of a melancholic phase. This was taken when I was traveling extensively, on the road from hotel to hotel. You get displaced, and then taking self-portraits becomes a way of hanging on to yourself.Collection: Taken
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Real
I think the wrong things are kept privateCollection: Thinking
My work is mostly about memory. It is very important to me that everybody that I have been close to in my life I make photographs of them.Collection: Memories
The camera is as much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Beautiful
I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.Collection: Inspired
If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what.Collection: Want
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Memories
The thing that drives me most crazy in the world is not to be believed.Collection: Crazy
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.Collection: Self
It's so rare to see a woman's sexuality, real female sexuality, either in the shows or in the clothes.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Fashion
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.Collection: Jealous
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.Collection: Cameras
I don't even like photography at all. I'm just doing photography until I can do something better.Collection: Photography
My life there[in New York] was almost entirely about gay men for 30 years.Collection: New York
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.Collection: Impact
Now what I like is that other artists know my work and are interested in me or want to collaborate.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Art
I have very healthy strong relationships with women.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Fashion
If I do continue to do fashion, I would want to radicalise it.Collection: Fashion
I had my first museum showing of my slide show in Rotterdam, in 1983. I love Rotterdam. I love harbour cities in general.Collection: Museums
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.Collection: Years
I did [heroin] maybe when I was 18 but I got over that pretty quickly.Collection: Heroin
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".Collection: Clothes
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.Collection: Cute
The things that I look at include Renaissance art. I'm obsessed with churches and paintings of saints.Collection: Art
I have the freedom of seeing it [churches and paintings of saints] with a non-Catholic eye without the guilt.Collection: Eye
No Jews have our own guilt, that's why we have psychiatrists - the Jewish version of a priest.Collection: Guilt
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.Collection: Years
[I influenced by ]the work of early [Michelangelo] Antonioni, Orson Welles and [Carlo] Pasolini, I love [Nicolas Jack] Roeg's film "Performance".Collection: Film
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.Collection: Clothes
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.Collection: Confused
I don't know if Yves St Laurent likes my work but Pierre Bergé does.Collection: Doe
Stella McCartney is [my] big fan.Collection: Fans
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.Collection: June