Nan Goldin, The ballad of sexual dependency, 2021

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was not meant to be a book. For several years, it was a kind of performance: Goldin projected the images, accompanying them with music. It is no accident that the title is inspired by a song by Bertoldt Brecht. The selection and sequence change each time. Only in 1986 did Aperture fixed the sequence in a book.

First published in 1986, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the struggles for intimacy and understanding among the friends and lovers whom Goldin describes as her tribe. These photographs described a lifestyle that was visceral, charged and seething with a raw appetite for living, and the book soon became the swan song for an era that reached its peak in the early 1980s. Twenty-five years later, Goldin’s lush color photography and candid style still demand that the viewer encounter their profound intensity head-on.

As she writes: “Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound and physical presence, the density and flavor of life.” Through an accurate and detailed record of Goldin’s life, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency records a personal odyssey as well as a more universal understanding of the different languages men and women speak.