Nan Goldin was born in 1953, in Washington, D.C. She graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at Tufts University in 1978. After graduation, she moved to New York City and began to use documentary photography to record her life, her friends and their intersection with a post-punk music scene of drag queens and transvestites. Major retrospective exhibitions have been held of her work at The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Pompidou Centre, Paris among others. Nan Goldin is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and lives in New York and London.

There are three works by Nan Goldin in the Channel 4 Collection. They are titled Guido on the train, Amalfi Coast, 1996, Twilight at the Arena, Arles, 1997, Smoky car, New Hampshire, 1979. Although most well known for her photographs of New York sub-culture, at the heart of Goldin's work is the drive to document her life and record the present so that memories don't fade. As such these photographs exist as emotive documents of the time that she spent in France, Italy and New Hampshire.

Goldin famously said of her work that it: "originally came from the snapshot aesthetic . . . Snapshots are taken out of love and to remember people, places, and shared times. They're about creating a history by recording a history."