Nan Goldin was born in 1953 in Washington DC and she works and lives in New York and Paris. Nan Goldin started taking photographs in Boston when she was a teenager: black-and-white images of drag queens, celebrating the subcultural lifestyle of her community. In the 1990s besides producing portraits of drag queens, Nan used photography to record the troubled lives of her friends who were dying of AIDS as well as her travels in Asia.
In 1996 a highly influential retrospective at the Whitney Museum of New York and centred around her slide-show The Ballad of Sexual Dependency enhanced her reputation as one of the most important living photographers. In 2001 another retrospective was organised by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. Since then, her work has become part of major collections such as that of MoMA, New York and of Tate Modern, London.
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