Nan Goldin for Icons

Nan Goldin is one of the most highly respected photographers of today. Her piece The Ballad of Sexual Dependency has been cited as one of the greatest influences upon Western contemporary art, and she validated the snapshot as art. Goldin sees herself as a defender of the real, the raw and the unaltered. She has stated that the original motivation to take photographs was “to make a record against revisionism and to retain memory”. Goldin’s work has been the subject of two major touring retrospectives: one organized in 1996 by the Whitney Museum of American Art and another, in 2001, by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. Recent exhibitions include the installation Sisters, Saints, & Sybils at La Chapelle de la Salpêtrière, Paris. Goldin was admitted to the French Legion of Honor in 2006 and received the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in 2007. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was most recently presented lived in Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London, in 2008, and the slideshow was installed in the exhibition Here is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 2008 to March 2009. Her newest slideshow Scopophilia was part of a special program at the Louvre

Goldin lives and works in Paris, New York and London.