99+ Nan Goldin Quotes On Art, Photography And Artwork

Nan Goldin is an American photographer known for her intimate and often provocative portraits of LGBTQ+ communities, family, and friends. She is widely recognized for her influential, diaristic style of photography, which often captures moments of vulnerability and intimacy. Her work has been exhibited in major institutions around the world and is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Nan Goldin on art, love, photography.

Top 10 Nan Goldin Quotes

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.
5. 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.
6. It's so rare to see a woman's sexuality, real female sexuality, either in the shows or in the clothes.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. I don't even like photography at all. I'm just doing photography until I can do something better.

Nan Goldin Short Quotes

• I never read theory. I think that was to my benefit.
• Each time I spend with Stella McCartney, I like her better. So I was excited to be asked by her.
• I have very healthy strong relationships with women.
• The thing that drives me most crazy in the world is not to be believed.
• I start to paint my walls. And I'm heavily influenced by films.
• 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.
• It's a hideous feeling to go round shopping and even feel like you are a freak.
• If I do continue to do fashion, I would want to radicalise it.
• I wasn't there [in U.S] when the city was bombed but it seems to have changed my friends.

Nan Goldin Quotes About Art

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

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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

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. — Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin Quotes About Love

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. — Nan Goldin

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

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

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

Nan Goldin Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Nan Goldin

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

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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". — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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

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. — Nan Goldin

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

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

I also met Dominique Sanda, who I always worshipped. — Nan Goldin

I did [heroin] maybe when I was 18 but I got over that pretty quickly. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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

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. — Nan Goldin

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

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

I never thought heroin was very chic. — Nan Goldin

I think the wrong things are kept private — Nan Goldin

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". — Nan Goldin

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

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. — Nan Goldin

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

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. — Nan Goldin

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

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

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

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

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

My work is received more intelligently in Europe. — Nan Goldin

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

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

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

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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 — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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

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. — Nan Goldin

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

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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

Gena Rowlands is fabulous. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

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. — Nan Goldin

[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. — Nan Goldin

Stella McCartney is [my] big fan. — Nan Goldin

Life Lessons by Nan Goldin

1. Nan Goldin's work emphasizes the importance of capturing moments of intimacy, vulnerability, and emotion in everyday life.
2. Her work serves as a reminder to appreciate the beauty in the mundane, and to document the moments that make up our lives.
3. Through her photographs, Goldin encourages us to be mindful of the present and to create meaningful memories with the people we love.