Nan Goldin Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Stella McCartney is [my] big fan.
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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.
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[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.
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I did [heroin] maybe when I was 18 but I got over that pretty quickly.
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One of my assistants, a British man, says I should find a platform for [cosmetic industry]. Meanwhile I wear make-up.
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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.
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I wasn't there [in U.S] when the city was bombed but it seems to have changed my friends.
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Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.
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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".
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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.
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Each time I spend with Stella McCartney, I like her better. So I was excited to be asked by her.
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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.
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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.
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The things that I look at include Renaissance art. I'm obsessed with churches and paintings of saints.
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Plastic surgery is distressingly popular and I feel that the fashion industry has killed tens of thousands of women over the years from anorexia.
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I have the freedom of seeing it [churches and paintings of saints] with a non-Catholic eye without the guilt.
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I also photographed Maggie Cheung - but these didn't develop into a friendship either.
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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
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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.
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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.
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No place could be less sympathetic to my politics than America.
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If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what.
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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.
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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.
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I don't think of Maria Schneider like idol anymore, because I worshipped her when I was young.
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The thing that drives me most crazy in the world is not to be believed.
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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.
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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.
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