Nan Goldin: The Beautiful Smile

"The Beautiful Smile is my favorite book." -Nan Goldin

The Beautiful Smile, unavailable since its original publication on the occasion of Nan Goldin’s (born 1953) Hasselblad Award of 2007, is finally back in print. The Hasselblad Award is considered the most important international photography prize in the world today; since 1980, award winners have included some of the greatest names the medium has known.

2007 winner Nan Goldin is easily one of the most significant photographers of our time. Adopting the direct aesthetics of snapshot photography, she has documented her own life and that of her friends and others on the margins of society for more than 30 years, offering frank depictions of drug abuse, cross-dressing and alternative sexualities. Her intimate photographs depict urban lives in New York and Europe in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, a period massively determined by HIV and AIDS. Her practice of photography as memoir, as a means of protection against loss and as an act of preservation, as well as her use of the slide show, resonates in the work of photographers of recent generations.

This classic volume, which the photographer has called her favorite of all of her books, is a moving homage to the work of one of the most eminent artists of our time.

Nan Goldin’s photographs are filled with spirits and ghosts, becoming vestiges of lives lived, loved, and lost. They are evidence of we who once were and no longer are, here today, gone tomorrow ­– were it not for her art. (Sara Rosen Feature Shoot)

Goldin’s visual diary contains echoes of moments that come very near to reflecting our own experiences and relationships. Our lives are remarkably similar in how we share joy and pain, desire and death, in equal measures and Goldin shows us our lives through hers, without any censorship (Sunil Shah American Suburb X)

When Nan Goldin looks at the photographs that defined her career, she recites a little prayer to herself: “Send love to each person that’s dead.”...For 30 years, her subjects have been those closest to her: Transsexuals, cross-dressers, drug users, lovers, all people she befriended when she moved to New York... They lived in what mainstream critics would coldly call the “margins of society,” and many died during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980. All of these subjects and more are featured in The Beautiful Smile... (Rena Silverman The New York Times, Lens Blog)