Since her debut in 1970s New York, the American star photographer Nan Goldin has elevated the snapshot into an art form and immortalised her close circle of friends, artists, lovers, bohemians and urban dandies in tens of thousands of photographs. Her opus is vulnerable and unpolished, and favoured by a unique intimacy between the photographer and her subjects. It is also marked by an at times self-destructive force that is redeemed in the photograph itself.

Goldin has never spared either herself nor those closest to her in her photographs, which document the dramatic ups and downs of life in an unfiltered way in which the act of immortalising those nearest to her also becomes the ultimate declaration of love.