Nan Goldin

(American, b.1953)

James King backstage at the Karl Lagerfeld show, Paris, 1995

Nan Goldin is known for documenting her surrogate family of friends as they engage in intimate, uninhibited, or illicit activities. These unusually lit images are frank confrontations with personal experience, frequently presented in poses that mimic the styles of the fashion world. Goldin visited that world through photographs she took for a New York Times Magazine cover story – “James is a Girl,” by Jennifer Egan – that appeared on February 4, 1996. King’s languid and mature pose in this photograph speaks of a teenager who has experienced much; it appeared in a cropped form on the magazine’s cover.

Nan Goldin has spent more than twenty-five years creating edgy portraits. In 1996 these startlingly direct color images were the subject of a mid-career retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which traveled to Winterthur, Germany; Vienna; and Amsterdam, among other international venues. She has earned the Mother Jones Photography Award, a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts, and the Maine Photographic Workshop Book Award for Documentary Book of the Year. Born in Washington, DC in 1953, Goldin earned her BFA (1977) and 5^th Year Masters Certificate from The School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Costa, Guido, and Nan Goldin. Nan Goldin. London; New York, NY: Phaidon, 2001.

Goldin, Nan, et al. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. New York, N.Y.: Aperture Foundation, 1986.

Goldin, Nan, David Armstrong and Walter Keller. The Other Side. New York: Scalo in Association with D.A.A.D. Artists-in-Residence-Programme, Berlin, 1993

Goldin, Nan, and Guido Costa. Ten Years After: Naples, 1986-1996. Zürich; New York: New York City: Scalo; Distributed in North America by D.A.P., 1998.

Goldin, Nan, and John Jenkinson. The Devil’s Playground. London; New York, NY: Phaidon, 2003.

Goldin, Nan, and Nobuyoshi Araki. Tokyo Love: Spring Fever 1994. Zurich; New York: New York: Scalo; Distributed in North America by D.A.P., 1995.

Sussman, Elisabeth, et al. Nan Goldin: I’ll be Your Mirror. New York: Zurich: Whitney Museum of American Art; Scalo, 1996.