Nan Goldin quotes:

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  • 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.

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

  • [John] Cassavetes, "Killing of a Chinese Booker", "Opening Night" are my favourites.

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

  • Each time I spend with Stella McCartney, I like her better. So I was excited to be asked by her.

  • 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.

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

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

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

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

  • [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.

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

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

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

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • Gena Rowlands is fabulous.

  • I also met Dominique Sanda, who I always worshipped.

  • 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.

  • I don't even like photography at all. I'm just doing photography until I can do something better.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I have very healthy strong relationships with women.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • I never read theory. I think that was to my benefit.

  • I never thought heroin was very chic.

  • 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".

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I think the wrong things are kept private

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I wasn't there [in U.S] when the city was bombed but it seems to have changed my friends.

  • I won't show a picture where a person doesn't look beautiful.

  • If I do continue to do fashion, I would want to radicalise it.

  • 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.

  • If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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".

  • It's a hideous feeling to go round shopping and even feel like you are a freak.

  • It's so rare to see a woman's sexuality, real female sexuality, either in the shows or in the clothes.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • My work is received more intelligently in Europe.

  • 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.

  • No Jews have our own guilt, that's why we have psychiatrists - the Jewish version of a priest.

  • No place could be less sympathetic to my politics than America.

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

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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.

  • Stella McCartney is [my] big fan.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The thing that drives me most crazy in the world is not to be believed.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I start to paint my walls. And I'm heavily influenced by films.

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

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