Nan Goldin

The Hasselblad Award is the most important international photography prize in the world today, and since 1980 award winners have included some of the greatest names the medium has known. The award is granted to "a photographer recognized for major achievement"; this may be an individual who has made a pioneering achievement in photography, who has had a decisive impact on one or more younger generations of photographers, or one who has implemented one or more internationally significant photographic projects.
The 2007 Hasselblad Award winner is Nan Goldin, easily one of the most significant photographers of our time. Adopting the direct aesthetics of snapshot photography, she has documented her own life and that of her friends and others on the margins of society for more than 30 years, offering frank depictions of drug abuse, cross-dressing and alternative sexualities. Her intimate photographs depict urban lives in New York and Europe in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, a period massively determined by HIV and AIDS. Her practice of photography as a memoir and as a defense against loss, and her use of the slide show to present her work, resonate increasingly in the work of photographers of recent generations.… (mere)

A photobook classic, and perhaps the work for which New York photographer Nan Goldin remains best known, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the struggle for intimacy and understanding between friends and lovers collectively described by Goldin as her “tribe.” Her work describes a late 1970s/early 1980s New York now long gone, and a world that is visceral and seething with life. As Goldin writes: “Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavor of life.”… (mere)

Nan Goldin's seminal second book The Other Side is finally back in print. Ever since the early 1970's Goldin has lived with and among drag queens, documenting both their glamour and their struggles. The Other Side is her very personal declaration of love and gratitude to these drag queens, who showed her a way out of the captivity of pre-packaged, socially prescribed identity. As she put it: "The pictures in this book are not of people suffering gender dysphoria but rather expressing gender euphoria.... The people in these pictures are truly revolutionary; they are the real winners in the battle of the sexes because they have stepped out of the ring." In contrast to much of the early 90's drag queen mania, The Other Side has brilliantly passed the test of time: Goldin's photographs are as beautiful, moving, and vibrant as ever, heralding the utopian promises of a world where gender has stopped being a prison-a vision that remains as vital and acute as it was when the book was first published.… (mere)