Who

Goldin invented the gritty hipster photograph: Her pictures of friends crossdressing, doing drugs, and having sex helped define a vivid, grungy aesthetic that's been popular for more than two decades.

Backstory

After a tumultuous childhood in D.C.—her older sister committed suicide when she was 14 and Nancy, as she was then known, lived with a series of foster parents during her teenage years—Goldin made her way to Boston, where she was introduced to the camera in the early 1970s and earned her first solo show. In 1978, she moved to New York. She spent the next few years living on the Bowery, fully immersed in a subculture of sex and drugs, a period of her life on display in her 1986 show "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency," which vaulted her to fame. (Among the highlights: snaps of her boyfriend masturbating, and of her own bruises after he beat her up.) In the late 1980s and early 1990s—after a spell in rehab and losing many friends (and photo subjects) to AIDS—Goldin entered a new phase of taking self-portraits. In 1996, the Whitney organized a mid-career retrospective of Goldin's work entitled "I'll Be Your Mirror."

Of note

Goldin is sometimes credited with/blamed for defining the heroin-chic aesthetic that dominated fashion and pop culture photography in the 1990s. Her work even became political fodder: Bill Clinton accused Goldin of making the dope-addled look appealing to America's youths. Nevertheless the style she pioneered still influences photography today, from fashion spreads in magazines to ad campaigns for any number of products. Now in her fifties, Goldin isn't quite as active as she used to be, largely because of the lingering effects of an injury she sustained while shooting photos on the set of Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding in 2001—she fell 12 feet into an empty swimming pool and smashed her hand, and has had to undergo multiple surgeries. But she's not totally inactive: She participates in the occasional fashion shoot for French Vogue and Visionaire. And her work remains widely sought after; notable collectors include longtime pals like John Waters, Elton John, Bjork, and Matthew Barney. Goldin is represented by Chelsea gallerist Matthew Marks.

On screen

In the 1998 film High Art, the character of Lucy Berliner—played by Ali Sheedy—was based on Goldin.

Habitat

Goldin currently divides her time between a loft on the Bowery and an apartment in Paris. She has said that she initially left the United States in 1991 because of the effect the AIDS epidemic had on New York's gay artists and writers.