Nan Goldin

1953, Washington D.C., United States

Nan Goldin is one of the most influential photographers of our time, celebrated for having made visible, with force and tenderness, the emotional and marginal universe of urban life. Her photography began as a visual diary: a tool for testimony, survival and love. Since the 1970s, through iconic projects such as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Goldin has portrayed intimacy, the body, loss, addiction and human bonds without filters.
Her work is an ongoing act of poetic resistance, in which the boundary between art and life dissolves, and every image becomes a gesture of closeness and memory. Goldin lived in Europe for many years, finding in the city of Naples an inexhaustible source of visual and emotional inspiration, where the sacred and the profane, the Baroque and the flesh, coexist as if in a blurred yet pulsating shot.

Nan Goldin

Piazza del Gesù, Napoli, 1997
Colour print on photographic paper,
101.6×69.5 cm

In Piazza del Gesù, Napoli, Nan Goldin photographs the city as if it were a body: imperfect, vibrant, nocturnal. The framing is slightly out of focus, the unnatural green light turns the Baroque spire into an apparition, while the deep blue sky heightens the sense of suspension. Everything seems to tremble, like a memory that cannot be fully grasped.
The work is an act of falling in love and of disorientation, typical of her gaze as an outsider who is nonetheless deeply empathetic. There is no pursuit of perfect aesthetics here, only of a real intensity. Goldin captures the city the way one captures a beloved face: with an emotional vibration that lingers longer than the image itself.
Naples, in this shot, is a place of the soul: both stage and sanctuary, flesh and spirituality. Like many of her photographs, this too is a fragile fragment of eternity, a visual diary of collective existences.