It was originally devised as a slideshow set to the music of Velvet Underground, James Brown, Nina Simone, Charles Aznavour, Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Petula Clark among others, to entertain Goldin's friends. [4] [2] It "portrayed her friends – many of them part of the hard-drugs subculture on New York's Lower East Side – as they partied, got high, fought and had sex. It was first publicly shown at the Whitney Biennial in New York in 1985 and was published as a photobook the following year." [4] At the end of that Provincetown summer, Goldin had image after image of her friends in the dunes, partying, living their lives as if they had all the time in the world. Because there was no dark-room nearby, she used slide film, which she had processed at the drugstore. In 1985 The Ballad slideshow was selected for inclusion in the Whitney Biennial. The following year, Goldin worked with curator Marvin Heiferman (who’d helped produce her slideshows for public viewing) to edit and compress The Ballad into a 127-image Aperture photo book of the same name. In a review in the New York Times, art critic Andy Grundberg wrote, “What Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ was to the 1950s, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is to the 1980s. . . . Goldin, at the age of 33, has created an artistic masterwork that tells us not only about the attitudes of her generation, but also about the times in which we live.” Just as certain works of literature can radically alter our understanding of language and form, there are a select number of books that can transform our sense of what makes a photograph, and why. Between 1972 and 1992, the Aperture Foundation published three seminal photography books, all by women. “Diane Arbus” (1972), published a year after the photographer’s death, documented a world of hitherto unrecorded people—carnival figures and everyday folk—who lived, it seemed, somewhere between the natural world and the supernatural. Sally Mann’s “Immediate Family” (1992), a collection of carefully composed images of Mann’s three young children being children—wetting the bed, swimming, squinting through an eyelid swollen by a bug bite—came out when the controversy surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe’s “The Perfect Moment” exhibition was still fresh, and it reopened the question of what the limits should be when it comes to making art that can be considered emotionally pornographic. Photographs by Nan Goldin. Edited by Mark Holborn, Marvin Heiferman, and Suzanne Fletcher. Afterword by Nan Goldin.

Constantly reedited and revised by her since then, The Ballad... is an evocation of a time and a place and is now imbued with a deep sense of loss that people seem to connect with deeply. At the Arles' photography festival of 2009, which was curated by Goldin , an outdoor screening held several hundred people in thrall. Likewise, in the more intimate setting of a dark room in Tate Modern a few years ago, when it was shown as part of a themed show, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, it proved the most popular attraction. "In my experience, people usually spend five or 10 minutes in an installation," says the Tate's curator of photography, Simon Baker, "but Nan's installation was full all the time. It's the mixture of narrative and music that keeps people watching. She is a master of sequencing. Many photographers have followed Goldin, but very few have produced work that is so monumental in scale and yet so powerfully intimate. She really is out there on her own." Maggie really politicized me. She is the one who helped me see the work is about gender politics. And I had talked to people in Provincetown about that in the ’70s. After she became involved, I started making it more and more obviously political, to speak to her. Sometimes it was really hateful toward men and sometimes it was really positive, depending how I was feeling. Each showing was different. I made slideshows specifically for people, too. I’d put in a lot of pictures specifically of that person and dedicate it to them. It could be anyone, a friend or a lover. In ’83 I started traveling in Europe and showing it. I showed it many more times in Europe than in America. I showed it in European museums as one-off shows as early as 1983, and in underground cinemas and clubs all over Europe. It was accepted there earlier than it was in the U.S. One of the people who later became a lover of mine in Berlin, he raised his hand and said, “I’d like to be in the slideshow.” And he was, afterward! Since those early days, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency has been shown all over the world, the book reissued in multiple printings. This year it was on view again at the Whitney, in the inaugural exhibit at the museum’s new downtown home. Tonight at Terminal 5, it will be screened with live performances by Laurie Anderson and Martha Wainwright and other musicians, at Aperture Foundation’s celebration of the 30th anniversary of the publication of the book. Last week, when I called Goldin in New York, we talked about the evolution and constant re-editing of Ballad, the bar where she was working when she made it into the Whitney Biennial, and the relationship between photographs and memory in her work. I found her to be as open and honest as her pictures.When we made the book, one of the challenges was getting model releases from people, which was dicey at times. I remember when Aperture asked, “Do you have model releases for everyone?” and I said, “No.” Something else I remember vividly is going down to the East Village to try to get hold of Brian, Nan’s ex, and get him to sign one and standing on the street, screaming up to his window, trying to cajole him to come down so I could give him a model release to sign—which never happened. Photography collection The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). The image on the cover is "Nan and Brian in Bed" (1983). The snapshot aesthetic book was first published with help from Marvin Heiferman, Mark Holborn, and Suzanne Fletcher in 1986. [ citation needed] Selected solo exhibitions [ edit ] Heiferman: Yes, and while the pictures were individually beautiful in a particular way, it was their cumulative impact that was overwhelming. Nobody was making that kind of work about people in complex, intimate relationships. Nobody was making those pictures about sex who wasn’t glamorizing or pathologizing it.

As a person, I would say yes," she answers, "but, creatively, this book is another part of a bigger journey insofar as I have always photographed my close friends and many of these pictures are of my friends' kids. Because of the subject matter, it's a lot more obviously hopeful, but it's not just about hope and joy. Kids are sad, too, and angry. It's really about the autonomy of being a child, about flexible gender and freedom, the wildness in children that gets hammered down as they grow up." Heiferman: That’s another quality of the work that’s wild. It is, in its own way, glamorous. You get to see this subculture that, for want of a better term, got turned into something cinematic. It’s a word that people tend to use a lot, but in this case the work really is. Nan always said she wanted to be a filmmaker, and I think that was always in her mind; she was always taking so many pictures. It was kind of like [Eadweard] Muybridge. She was both living life and capturing it in stop-motion. David [Armstong] and I called our work the dust and scratch school," she says, "because all we cared about was the content. We didn't give a shit about prints." The Ballad... is best experienced, Goldin says, as an installation. "The slideshow is really my medium. I wanted to make films. That was always the ambition." Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.a b Bracewell, Michael (14 November 1999). "Landmarks in the Ascent of Nan". The Independent . Retrieved 27 December 2014.

Pérez: It’s still this confusing thing to many people. It seems a little more accepted now, but I feel like people are still not sure to this day. Heiferman: Yes, we both worked to line up venues to show it, and I was around when she was editing the slideshow some of the time. That was an extraordinary part of the experience, because while photographers so often work toward distilling a concise body of work, here we were dealing with this expansive, evolving, public, performative, dramatic thing. Some images were always included in the slideshows, but new ones were introduced all the time. Sometimes the chaos of the slideshow coming together—and often in the moments right before we had to throw carousel trays full of slides into bags, get in a cab, and show up someplace and present it—was unbelievable. Bringing together portraiture from modern painters and setting them against historic depictions, this exhibition looks at how the idea of family has transformed in the past 50 years Heiferman: The book has 127. That was the big challenge. It was clear that Nan wanted to do a book and wanted it to be an Aperture book, because she had an appreciation for what they did, and she wanted to be part of that history. That kind of ambition was, I thought, terrific, but at that point Aperture had never done anything like The Ballad. For me, what I learned when I was working in the ’80s was that you’ve got to make your own opportunities. The way the photography world was set up at that time, it was stratified, conservative, and dominated largely by straight white guys. If you wanted to make friction or make a break, you had to figure out how to do it yourself.

Zarina Bhimji: Flagging It Up

I haven’t seen it yet. I want to. I recently lost a friend who had dealt with some similar things, and I’ll watch the film at some point, but I can’t yet. But there was a slideshow for this friend's wake, with music playing, pictures from these very wild, free, happier, beautiful times. In the text for her book, Goldin described The Ballad as a “visual diary” to share with the world. But whereas Robert Frank’s concerns were largely documentary, she was adamant that her pictures “come out of relationships, not observation,” and she included many self-portraits. (A more apt comparison may be to Larry Clark, whose autobiographical 1971 photo book, Tulsa, Goldin has cited as an inspiration.) Goldin wrote in The Ballad, “There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.” With this accumulated evidence of her sister's troubled life, she also set out to make a biographical film. "I met all the people she had ever known, went to every place she had ever been, all the hospitals and the place where she killed herself. I was with a few close friends and we shot for months, but then I just could not edit it. I had a breakdown." So, there was no catharsis? "No. And the film never got made. Now that my father has gone, I could tell the whole story, which is even worse. It's not just about me and my sister, but my parents as well. But, you know," she says, looking uncertain, "maybe I don't need to do that now." In 2022, Goldin was awarded the Käthe Kollwitz Prize for her contributions to contemporary photography. A retrospective exhibition, “This Will Not End Well,” is touring European museums for the next couple of years, with an accompanying book coming in 2023. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the new documentary directed by Laura Poitras, covers Goldin’s life and work, with a focus on her P.A.I.N. activism. It won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival.

In her snapshots of people at parties, in bars, lounging around, having sex, on the beach, and riding trains in New York, Provincetown, and Berlin, Goldin pinpointed and captured the joy and the pain of those who populated her life, many of whom were queer, drug users, or otherwise nonconforming to “traditional” norms. (Goldin herself was a sex worker during this time, she revealed recently.) The same people appear again and again—Armstrong, Greer Lankton, Cookie Mueller, Suzanne Fletcher, Sharon Niesp, and someone identified only as Brian, a longtime boyfriend of Goldin’s. But I knew I could, pretty easily, take the book project to Aperture because I knew a lot of people working there. I just wasn’t sure they’d bite. I think I showed it to Mark Holborn [an editor there] before I showed it to Michael Hoffman [the former director of Aperture], but when I showed the work to Michael and he said, “We’ll do it,” I thought, Whoa. Whoa, we did that. Spread from the original maquette of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, ca. 1985 The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, exhibition and screening, Guest of honour at Rencontres d'Arles, Arles, France. [ citation needed] Trixie on the Ladder, NYC” (1979): Goldin “showed life as it was happening.” Photograph by Nan Goldin / Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

At 15, she had her first show in Boston, which featured a community of drag queens she was then hanging out with. "I wished I could put them on the cover of Vogue, because all I knew about photography came from the fashion magazines," she says, laughing. "I was a good shoplifter and I would steal Italian and French Vogue and we'd pore over them for hours. The queens would fight over my photographs and rip up the ones they hated." The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, exhibition and screening, Théâtre Antique. Rencontres d'Arles, Arles, France. [ citation needed] Five years. And in the first few years after my shift I would go to an after-hours bar and work there and it was a lot of bad cocaine, and when it closed at 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning, we’d go to breakfast and everyone would be reading the racing forms. That went on for years, and then I started working the day shift at the bar, and that’s when I met the guy Brian who’s in the pictures. That’s true. But then it became like Amy Winehouse. I felt such a strong connection with her because, you know, at the end I showed up at some fancy place in Chicago and I was too drugged to finish the slideshow, and there was a huge audience, and I know exactly how she felt when she showed up wherever it was and she couldn’t perform. I mean, I had an audience of 500 and she had an audience of probably 50,000, but it was the same feeling. And it happened to me twice. It’s really painful. I loved that movie.