The Beautiful Smile

The Beautiful Smile is a reprint of the out-of-print book originally published on the occasion of Nan Goldin's Hasselblad Award of 2007. Adopting the direct aesthetics of snapshot photography, Goldin has been documenting her own life and that of her friends for more than forty years. Her intimate and formally beautiful photographs focus on the urban scene in New York and Europe in the 1970s, '80s and '90s, a period dramatically marked by HIV and AIDS. Her practice of photography as memoir, as a means of protection against loss and as an act of preservation, as well as her use of the slide show, resonates in the work of photographers of recent generations.

Nan Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., in 1953 and is one of the eminent photographers of our times. She studied at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and since 1982 has visited and worked in Europe on a regular basis. Goldin received the Hasselblad Photography Award in 2007, and today lives in Berlin, New York and Paris.