Photographer Nan Goldin is recognized as the most influential artist in the world

Art Review Art Review has published an annual rating of the 100 most influential artists and other people of art. In 2023, it was headed by Nan Goldin, an American photographer and civic activist.

Goldin was born in 1953 in Washington. As a teenager, she ran away from home to New York. According to her own words, she took up photography as a hobby to photograph friends. Her photos became a chronicle of the New York underground, bohemian community and LGBT circles. For the first time, she became famous with the photo series “Ballad of Sexual Addiction” made in 1985 – a direct and sharp fixation of the underground life of New York.

Goldyn survived and reflected in her photos the AIDS epidemic, which took the lives of many of her characters in the late 1980s and 1990s, domestic violence, alcohol and drug addiction. Having become a sought-after photographer, she participated in public campaigns to combat HIV infection. In the mid-2010s, Goldin was treated for addiction to opioid painkillers, after which she became one of the most famous fighters against their uncontrolled distribution, which, according to activists, was lobbied by pharmaceutical companies.

Nan Goldin is a laureate of numerous artistic and photographic awards, including the Hasselblad Award, the Kathe Koelwitz Award of the Berlin Academy of Arts, and others.

The top five of the ArtReview rating also included such artists as the German Hito Steyerl, the Thai Rikrit Tiravaniya, the American Simone Li and the British Isaac Julien.