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.