Nan Goldin (born 1953) is a notable American fine-art and documentary photographer.

Goldin was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in the DC area suburbs in Maryland, but ran away from home and was fostered by a variety of families. Her later schooling was at the Satya Community School in Boston, where a teacher introduced her to the camera in 1968, when she was fifteen years old. Her first solo show was in Boston in 1973, based on her photography among the city's gay and transvestite communities, to which she had been introduced by her friend David Armstrong. It was he who renamed her "Nan". She graduated from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University in 1977/8, where she had worked mostly with Cibachrome prints.

After graduation, she moved to New York City and began documentary photography of the post-punk new-wave music scene, and the city's vibrant gay subculture in the late 1970's and early 1980's, gradually being drawn in to the Bowery's hard drug subculture. These photographs, taken from 1979 to 1986, form her famous work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The snapshot aesthetic images depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. Most of her Ballad subjects were dead by the 1990s due to either drug overdoses or AIDS, including close friends and often photographed subjects, Greer Lankton and Cookie Mueller. In addition to the Ballad she combined her pictures in two other series I'll Be Your Mirror and All by Myself.

Goldin's work is most often presented in the form of a slideshow and has been shown at film festivals. Most famous is a 45 minute show in which 800 pictures are displayed. The main themes of her early pictures are love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality, usually made with available light.

Goldin's recent pictures (since 1995) have included a wide array of subject matter, including collaborative book projects with famed Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki; landscapes of New York skylines; uncanny landscapes (notably of people in water); her lover, Siobhan; and babies, parenthood and family life. She was the winner of the 2007 Hasselblad Award.

In September of 2007, Northumbria Police seized the photograph "Klara and Edda belly-dancing" before it was shown at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, on suspicion that it may have violated UK child pornography laws. The photo shows a young girl with her legs apart. According to an article by Reuters, dated 10-26-2007, one child is nude; this fact is in the caption under the second photograph with the article, at least the AOL on-line version. The photograph was on loan from the private collection of Sir Elton John who purchased it as part of the "Thanksgiving" installation in 1999.

According to Sir Elton John

The photograph exists as part of the installation as a whole and has been widely published and exhibited throughout the world. It can be found in the monograph of Ms. Goldin's works entitled `The Devil's Playground' (Phaidon, 2003), has been offered for sale at Sotheby's New York in 2002 and 2004, and has previously been exhibited in Houston, London, Madrid, New York, Portugal, Warsaw and Zurich without any objections of which we are aware.

.. but a spokeswoman for London's Saatchi Gallery has since confirmed that the picture was in fact one of the photographs which - following a complaint from Rupert Murdoch's News of the World tabloid - the Metropolitan Police Service's Obscene Publications Unit seized from the gallery's 2001 "I Am a Camera" exhibition.

However, at that time, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) deemed it not to be an indecent image.

As of October 1, 2007, in a statement from Jane Jackson, curator of the Elton John Photographic Collection: "We have made arrangements to close the 'Thanksgiving' Installation at The Baltic with immediate effect. It was always intended that the Installation be exhibited as a whole, and not on a piecemeal basis, and our decision has been made with regard to the artistic integrity of the work and the artist."

The photograph "Klara and Edda belly-dancing" was again judged "not indecent" by the Crown Prosecution Service.

Goldin currently lives in New York and Paris, resulting in the Pompidou Centre holding a major retrospective of her work in 2002. Her hand was injured in a fall in 2002, and currently remains with less ability to turn it than in the past.

Some critics have accused her of making heroin-use appear glamorous, and of pioneering a grunge style that later became popularized by youth fashion magazines such as The Face and I-D. Goldin has, however, called the use of "heroin chic" to sell clothes and perfumes "reprehensible and evil."

The character of Lucy Berliner played by actress Ally Sheedy in the film "High Art" was based on Goldin's life and work.

*(2003) Devils Playground. Phaidon Press. ISBN 978-0714842233. *(1997) Love Streams. Yvon Lambert. *(1996) I'll Be Your Mirror. Scalo Publishers. ISBN 978-3931141332. *(1986) The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Aperture. ISBN 978-0893812362.

*Nan Goldin at the Museum of Contemporary Photography *Interview with Nan Goldin *Nan Goldin at the Galerie Yvon Lambert *Reuters article on-line at AOL stating one child in her photograph is nude. See second caption under photograph.