Nan Goldin

"Getting a good picture is like diving for pearls. You take a thousand pictures to get a good one." - Nan Goldin

In her newest work, Nan Goldin merges her deep admiration for the artworks of the past with a lifelong dedication to her most immediate circle of friends. Invited by the Louvre, she photographed artworks of her choice at the museum and, guided by aesthetic and associative considerations, connected them to earlier photographs of her friends and lovers. In this way she not only draws inspiration from the rich sources of art history but revisits her own oeuvre of the last 40 years.

The striking similarities between the two different pictorial worlds exert an intense dynamic on the viewer. The series, which yielded over 400 photographs, was shown for the first time in its full scope at the Kestnergesellschaft in Hannover, Germany. For this occasion, Diving for Pearls was conceived as an independent artist book which, alongside Goldin’s newest work "Saints," contains a selection of photographs that have never been published before.

Eden and After is a new collection of photographs from one of the most influential photographers working today. For over 30 years, Nan Goldin has created intimate and compelling photographs that tell personal stories of relationships, friendships, and identity while chronicling different eras and exposing the passage of time.

Here, Goldin presents photographs of children that capture the energy, emotion, and mystery of childhood. This beautifully produced book features 300 color illustrations and an introduction from Guido Costa, an art dealer and close friend of the artist.

First published in 1986, Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the struggles for intimacy and understanding among the friends and lovers whom Goldin describes as her "tribe."

These photographs described a lifestyle that was visceral, charged and seething with a raw appetite for living, and the book soon became the swan song for an era that reached its peak in the early 1980s. Twenty-five years later, Goldin's lush color photography and candid style still demand that the viewer encounter their profound intensity head-on. As she writes: "Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound and physical presence, the density and flavor of life."

Through an accurate and detailed record of Goldin's life, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency records a personal odyssey as well as a more universal understanding of the different languages men and women speak. The book's influence on photography and other aesthetic realms has continued to grow, making it a classic of contemporary photography. This anniversary edition features all-new image separations produced using state-of-the-art technologies and specially prepared reproduction files, which offer a lush, immersive experience of this touchstone monograph.

Nan Goldin is internationally recognized as one of today's leading photographers. Her photographs have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, including SFMOMA, California, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Museu Reina Sofia, Madrid. Born in Washington DC, Goldin grew up in Boston where she began taking photographs at the age of fifteen.

She has since lived in New York, Bangkok, Berlin, Tokyo and Paris, amassing an extensive body of work that represents a fascinating photographic portrait of our time. Since the 1980s, Goldin has consistently created images that are intimate and compelling; they tell personal stories of relationships, friendships and identity, but simultaneously chronicle different eras and the passage of time. Her 'snapshot'-esque images of her friends - drag queens, drug addicts, lovers and family - are intense, searing portraits that, together, make a document of her life.

Goldin herself has commented on her photographic style and philosophy, saying, 'My work originally came from the snapshot aesthetic... Snapshots are taken out of love and to remember people, places, and shared times. They're about creating a history by recording a history'. Her work often breaks social taboos with its explicit exploration of relationships, sexuality and eroticism, and has also shown the devastating effect AIDS has had on her community of friends.

Through its sequence of 55 images, Nan Goldin presents an overview of the photographer's entire career, and illustrates the development of the intimate and raw style for which Goldin has become internationally renowned.