Up close and personal

Could you photograph your friends getting off with each other? Perhaps, more poignantly, would they want you to? For US photographer Nan Goldin, this is no problem. Nor does she flinch from taking pictures of her friends sobbing their eyes out at a funeral, or of herself when her lousy ex-lover gave her a righteous black eye. These brutally unapologetic photographs, and about 300 more besides, can be seen later this month when her longoverdue solo retrospective, Devil's Playground, opens at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

At first glance Nan Goldin's work looks like one more grungy fashion shoot. In fact, her richly saturated, trashglamour style has influenced pretty much every fashion photographer and his pooch since the early 1990s. It's also bled into the contemporary art market, which is now saturated with a glut of "me and my friends" photographers, the preferred strategy of those wishing to upgrade their status from jobbing photographer to art world darling.

These photographistes document their lives and loves in a snapshot style heavily indebted to Goldin: think of grunge madam, fashion photographer Corinne Day, who showed her smack-addled chums in their seedy homes at the Photographers' Gallery last year, or Juergen Teller, another fashionista who's just exhibited an interminable tide of snapshots of his Bavarian family and the celebrities he hangs out with. Hell, the influence is even there in Mario Testino's faux-informal (but none the less star-studded) fashion shoots, due to be shown at the National Portrait Gallery from early February.

Where does all this lifestyle photography come from? As a backlash to clever-clever, digitally manipulated postmodern photography (from Smirnoff ads to Andreas Gursky), there's a nostalgia for the good, old-fashioned snapshot with all its associations of spontaneous intimacy. And in a celebrity-smitten culture, we're all keen to fantasise about how the famous really live. Of course, in Goldin's case, her subjects are well known only because of her photographs - but there's a romanticism to her distillation of a scene, in the same way that Andy Warhol captured the druggy haze of the Factory.

The Warhol influence is one that Goldin readily acknowledges, along with Larry Clark's gritty pictures of disaffected youths in Tulsa making out in the early Seventies. Unlike Warhol and Clark, however, Nan is happy to have the camera turned back on her: these painfully sensitive images are usually taken at her lowest ebb, and show Goldin's immediately recognisable mane of curly brown hair and piercing eyes.

And if Warhol was in love with the glittery surface, Nan Goldin gets right under her subject's skin: "I use photography to learn about another person," she says, "It's about how close you can get to another person's body." Cue armpit hair, tears and wrinkles - a far cry from Teller's "authentic" photo of Claudia Schiffer, lying in bed with mascara dribbling down her cheeks.

Nan Goldin, now 48, has made a living out of photographing the happy, the sad and the sordid moments of her life. Being the die-hard party machine that she is, this also means photographing the lives of her friends around her, in all their intimately gory glory. Her docudiary of bohemian life in mid-Eighties New York, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, showed the parties, the sex, the drugs and the hideous comedown of Aids. It's shown as a slide-show, set to her favourite music, and Right-wing critics were enraged by its candid depictions of gay sex and dying lovers. Next to Nan, unstoppable confessionalists like Tracey Emin pale by comparison: Goldin's portraits of unmade beds, pouting drag queens and abusive lovers are heartbreakingly tender.

You could even see her work as a Hogarthian morality tale of lowlife characters, showing the responsibilities of such unconventional " families" at a time when the US state was conspicuously slow to offer support.

But for us, looking on at the party, isn't the crucifying intimacy of Goldin's photography just plain voyeuristic? You have to wonder what her friends reckon about being shown this way in public. "I never show a picture of anyone without them approving it," she says. "People always get to choose what I use. There are some incredible pictures I'd love to show, but (they) were not approved. It's very frustrating."

So are her friends just inveterate narcissists? They must love being photographed, and Goldin admits that it turns some of them on - even though her images are far from universally flattering.