Artwork copyright © Nan Goldin. Digital image courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
“I don’t ever want to be susceptible to anyone else’s version of my history,” wrote photographer Nan Goldin at the end of her essay for her photobook The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, first published in 1986. In the 20-plus printings of her debut—and still most celebrated—work, Goldin has never changed the foreword (although she does recontextualize the afterword every decade or so).
Goldin also explained in the introduction why the Ballad is dedicated to her older sister, Barbara, who committed suicide when the artist was 11 years old. “I lost the real memory of my sister. I remember my version of her, of the things she said, of the things she meant to me. But I don’t remember the tangible sense of who she was,” Goldin wrote. “I don’t ever want to lose the real memory of anyone again.” Goldin’s insatiable need to document those closest to her and preserve the most intimate and mundane moments of their time together is the thread connecting the hundreds of documentary and snapshot-style photographs that make up what is considered her magnum opus.
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In honor of the 40th anniversary of the now-canonical book’s publication, the London outpost of Gagosian gallery is exhibiting all 126 photographs that appear in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Past exhibitions of the work have taken place at museums such as MoMA and the Tate Modern.
Titled after a song in the German play The Threepenny Opera (1928) by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, the photographs in Ballad were mostly taken between 1973 and 1986. Goldin photographed herself and those in her orbit—friends, lovers, drag queens, addicts—all wrestling with various desires and relationships (including their relationships with themselves). The locales include New York, Boston, Berlin, Provincetown, and Mexico in settings such as bars, bedrooms, cars, beaches, and bordellos. They document the places inhabited by a twentysomething Goldin as she started making a life after leaving her troubled home in suburban Massachusetts at age 14 and embarking on a peripatetic journey that took her in and out of boarding schools, foster homes, communes, and relationships.
The earliest iteration of Ballad, true to its operatic title, was a slideshow with an eclectic soundtrack. Goldin conceived of it as a 45-minute performance screening around 750 images and accompanied by as many as 40 songs, shown in New York nightclubs and small venues around the city where she would hold the projector and click through the slides herself. The musical tracks were varied, including songs like “Femme Fatale” (1972) by the Velvet Underground, “I Put a Spell on You” (1956) by Screaming Jay Hawkins, “Memories Are Made of This” (1955) by Dean Martin, and others by Maria Callas and Dionne Warwick.
The Ballad slideshow was part of a now-famous 1980 collaborative group exhibition, the “Times Square Show.” It ultimately became well enough known to be shown at the 1985 Whitney Biennial before being published by Aperture the following year as the photobook that is renowned today. Retaining some of its musical beginnings, the book’s table of contents was a list of song titles that the reader could pair with the images if desired.
The photographs themselves broke boundaries in a few ways. The images position Goldin as a sort of voyeur, an unexpected role for women in the history of art. Her use of color, as opposed to black and white, also helped create a shift in accepting that serious photography could be prismatic. Goldin also helped generate greater recognition of the personal snapshot as art, with her novel fusion of diary, family album, fashion photography, paparazzi photography, and photojournalism in Ballad.
“Goldin didn’t photograph the so-called natural world,” wrote critic Hilton Als about the series. “She photographed life business as show business, a world in which difference began on the surface. You could be a woman if you dressed like one. Or you could dress like some idea of yourself, a tarted-up badass woman, say, who struggles to break free from social decorum by doing all the things she’s not supposed to do: crying in public, showing her ectopic-pregnancy scars, pissing and maybe missing the toilet, coming apart, and then pasting herself back together again.”
One of the iconic images from the series is the self-portrait Nan one month after being battered (1984). It shows the photographer’s face after she was beaten by her ex-Marine, drug-addicted boyfriend Brian, who also features in Ballad. The photograph shows Goldin’s still-swollen nose and blackened eyes (one of which needed stitches to prevent the eyeball from falling out of its socket) but also her signature red lipstick. (The artist developed a serious drug addiction after that incident and went to rehab in 1989.)
Goldin’s photographs are hyper-specific to her own life and to particular moments, yet in them the personal morphs into the universal. As a record of punky 1980s bohemia, Ballad has come to define a particular moment in downtown New York City culture. Her subjects exude a youthful sense of immortality that was quickly interrupted by the AIDS crisis, which took the lives of several of Goldin’s friends and photography subjects. When Ballad was first released as a book, the New York Times chief photography critic, Andy Grundberg, wrote that “what Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ was to the 1950s, Nan Goldin’s ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ is to the 1980s.”
“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the diary I let people read,” Goldin later wrote about the work. “The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember.”
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