Biography: Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (born 1953) is an American photographer. She was drawn into gay, transsexual, hard-drug addicts communities and started documenting the scene. Her famous work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency includes photographs taken between 1979 - 1986, which shows violent, drug abusing couples also her autobiographical moments. Most of the people in Ballads were close friends of an artist and were dead by 1990s of drug overdose or AIDS.



Work of Nan Goldin is very personal and based on her experience and observations. Suicidal of her sister at the age of eighteen has a huge impact in Goldins work. Exhibition Chasing a Ghost opened in 2006 was her first installation which includes moving picture, narrative score and voiceover, and has a three screen slide and video presentation Sisters, Saints & Sybils which includes her sisters' suicide (at the age of eighteen) and how artist coped with it.

Nan Goldin, Sisters, Saints & Sybils, 2004, installation view at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

It's very contraversial and shocking in some ways. To my opinion it shows a different side of life, which most of us might find unconfortable to face, but it's still the part of our lives and can not be ignored.

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/13609/nan-goldin/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nan_Goldin
http://www.matthewmarks.com/artists/nan-goldin/
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E07E1DD1130F934A35757C0A9609C8B63
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/stender/stender3-31-06_detail.asp?picnum=6