" For me, it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody—it’s a caress."
Nan Goldin is a contemporary American artist whose practice focuses primarily on photography. Nan Goldin's photographs address their subject intimately and tell of her loves, her friendships, her loneliness, and her fragility, combining emotional power with brutal realism, as happy moments are mixed with more tragic circumstances. The main themes evoked in her work are parties, drugs, violence, sex, and anxiety. Nan Goldin considers the camera to be an ideal medium for preserving traces of life and thus allowing the birth of a second memory. By photographing her loved ones, she commits their lives to film, as a sort of tribute to her friends, her parents, her lovers.