The Beautiful Smile The Hasselblad Award 2007

The Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography for 2007 has been awarded to Nan Goldin. Nan Goldin is one of the most significant photographers of our time. Adopting the direct esthetics of snapshot photography she has been documenting her own life and that of her friends for more than 30 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 use of photography as a memoir, as a means of protection against loss and as an act of preservation, and her use of the slide show as a means of presenting her work, resonates in the work of photographers of recent generations.