Goldin invented the gritty hipster photograph: Her pictures of friends crossdressing, doing drugs, and having sex helped define a vivid, grungy aesthetic that's been popular for more than two decades.

After a tumultuous childhood in D.C. Goldin made her way to Boston, where she was introduced to the camera in the early 1970s and earned her first solo show. In 1978, she moved to New York. She spent the next few years living on the Bowery, fully immersed in a subculture of sex and drugs, a period of her life on display in her 1986 show "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency," which vaulted her to fame. (Among the highlights: snaps of her boyfriend masturbating, and of her own bruises after he beat her up.) In the late 1980s and early 1990s—after a spell in rehab and losing many friends (and photo subjects) to AIDS—Goldin entered a new phase of taking self-portraits. In 1996, the Whitney organized a mid-career retrospective of Goldin's work entitled "I'll Be Your Mirror."

Goldin is sometimes credited with/blamed for defining the heroin-chic aesthetic that dominated fashion and pop culture photography in the 1990s. Her work even became political fodder: Bill Clinton accused Goldin of making the dope-addled look appealing to America's youths. Nevertheless the style she pioneered still influences photography today, from fashion spreads in magazines to ad campaigns for any number of products. Goldin isn't quite as active as she used to be, largely because of the lingering effects of an injury she sustained while shooting photos on the set of Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding in 2001. But she's not totally inactive: She participates in the occasional fashion shoot for French Vogue and Visionaire. [Image via Getty]