Nan Goldin, documentary photographer,  is best known for its realistic subject matter of drug taking, sexual relations, and intimate life of friends and lovers. Goldin’s work is mostly shown in slideshows, which can consist of 800 images that of mostly sexual nature. The main themes of Goldin’s work are love, gender, domesticity, sexuality, and drug addiction. These frames are usually shot with available light, and consist of real life people in genuine situations. Goldin continued to record throughout all of her work, events, situations and developing friendships within the ‘bohemian’ circle which she had become part of.  She deliberately sequences her photographs into themes that direct the observer to think beyond the specifics of her subjects’ lives and about universal experience and realism.

Goldin’s images are viewed like a private journal made public. Some critics have accused her of making heroin-use appear ‘glamorous’. When really she simply just wants the public to view real life, and states this in a 2002 interview with The Observer, Goldin herself called the use of "heroin chic" to sell clothes and perfumes "reprehensible and evil”. This is proven in her intense record of work, of the impact of HIV and AIDS-related illness, drug addiction and rehabilitation on her and her friends. 

Reading:

Nan Goldin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nan_Goldin

Charlotte Cotton (2009) The photograph as contempoary art (new ed) Thames & Hudson; world of art (17 Aug 2009)