Best 71 quotes of Nan Goldin on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I have very healthy strong relationships with women.

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

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

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

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.

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 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 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.

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

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

I never thought heroin was very chic.

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".

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

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 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'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 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 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.

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

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 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 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.