Press review

We choose this article because Nan Goldin is a real punk. Pushing the limits, she does not care about "what her photos look like" and put the stress on "what they mean". As far as we are concerned, this is the real aesthetic.

“I trust every journalist and I get fucked every time,” said US photographer Nan Goldin when she let me into her Copenhagen hotel-room for an interview during the CPH:DOX film festival. Her guardedness is unsurprising, the artist having been both massively influential and crucified by the media for an aesthetic marrying glamour with a dark, sleaze-edged lived reality. Accusations of abetting the fashion world's adoption of 'heroin chic' and 2007's British furore over an exhibited child portrait, which she puts down to a gallery publicity stunt, have dogged her.

Still, her warm regard for friends and heroes came through, foremost her current cinematic idol Lars von Trier, who’d had her over for dinner for the first time the evening prior. The Danish provocateur is of course another genius talent prone to press controversy, his 'Melancholia' having won Best Film recently at the European Film Awards despite the film having been overshadowed in the last year by his inflammatory Cannes press-conference “joking”. Goldin also spoke of the influences which bled into her seminal slide-show 'The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency', an intimate assemblage of photographs documenting the hard-living underground of '80s New York, which screened at CPH:DOX.

Read the interview

This article has been selected by Elena Philipova / Modemonline