Nan Goldin
Hasselblad Award Winner 2007
The Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation has chosen American photographer Nan Goldin as the recipient of the 2007 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. The prize, consisting of SEK 500,000 (approximately USD 70,000) and a gold medal, will be presented at a ceremony held in Göteborg, Sweden, on November 10, 2007. A new exhibition of Nan Goldin’s work, curated and organized by the Hasselblad Center, will be opened in conjunction with the ceremony.
The Foundation’s citation regarding the decision to award the 2007 prize to Nan Goldin is as follows:
Nan Goldin is one of the most significant photographers of our time. She has been documenting her own life and that of her friends – her extended family – for more than 30 years, focusing on the urban scene in New York and Europe in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, marked so dramatically by HIV and AIDS. Her work, while based on the direct esthetics of snapshot photography, presents her personal life as work of arts; intimate, formally beautiful, and with intense use of color. The presentation of her work in the form of slide shows resonates in the work of photographers of more than one generation. Her use of photography as a memoir, as a means of protection against loss and as an act of preservation responds to the needs of our times.
This year’s prize committee,
which submitted its proposal to the Foundation’s board of directors, was composed of:
- Christine Frisinghelli
- Chair of the jury, Director of Camera Austria, Graz, Austria,
- Frits Gierstberg
- Head of Exhibitions, Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, The Netherlands,
- Lars Schwander
- Director of Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen, Denmark,
- Teresa Siza
- Director of Centro Português de Fotografia, Porto, Portugal,
- Liz Wells
- Reader in Photographic Theory and Director of the research group for Land/Water and the Visual Arts, Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, Great Britain.
