Nan Goldin is an American photographer that shoots mainly with available light. Most often she presents her work in the form of a slideshow, being as long as 45 minutes with over 800 slides. When presenting these slideshows at film festivals, she uses a soundtrack to make the shows more of a narrative. When shooting, Goldin chooses to act as if she was invisible to her subjects to get a raw feeling in her photographs. One of the many types of cameras that she chooses to use is the Leica M6, a rangefinder film camera. Though, the work that made her known was not made from a Leica M6, but rather Nikon SLR's. In the 1970's and 80's, Goldin worked with Cibachrome prints (a dye destruction, positive to positive photographic process used for the reproduction of film transparencies).
When it comes to Goldin's themes, she focuses on examining gender, sex roles, and the politics that surround these issues. When she was younger, her first solo show was based around the experiences she had exploring the gay and transsexual communities in Boston. David Armstrong introduced Goldin to this community when she was in college, which ended up leading to her most well-known work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. This series of work focuses mainly on the use of heroin, violence, and aggressive couples. One interesting part about this series was that the majority of the subjects in these photos were dead by the 1990's (ten years later), due to AIDS or overdosing. Ever since the 1990's, Goldin has focused mainly on photographing New York skylines, babies, landscapes with people in water, and family life.
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