Nan Goldin | The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Nan Goldin

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

New York City, USA: Aperture Books, 1986

144 pp., 25.2 x 22.8 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

Titled after a song from The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill ("Ballade von der sexuellen Hörigkeit"), The Ballad of Sexual Dependency began as a slide show that Goldin would perform live, alongside songs by James Brown, Maria Callas, Nina Simone, The Velvet Underground  and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. 

The slides were deeply personal photographs she had taken of herself, and her friends and lovers in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. They are featured primping, posing, dancing, bathing, fucking, getting married and raising children. They suffer the ravages of AIDs, drug abuse and domestic violence. 

If the original live presentations reappropriated the rec room family slide show, the 1986 Aperture book does the same for the family photo album.

"The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the diary I let people read,” Goldin wrote. “The diary is a form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember.” 

Accolades for the book are numerous. Andrew Roth calls it "perhaps the most influential photography book since Diane Arbus' 1972 monograph." Martin Parr wrote "like most of the great photobooks, it is an honest, troubling, passionate, deeply poetic mirror held up to our times." Guardian critic Sean O'Hagan calls the book a "a benchmark for all other work in a similar confessional vein." Lucy Davies, in The Telegraph, said it "would come to influence a generation of fledgling photographers, who fell into her truth-telling wake."

Village Voice critic J. Hoberman named the original slide show as one of his favourite films of 1985, calling it "a near-definitive portrait of a particular Lower East Side bohemia". 

Mock-ups of the book appear in the new documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which played in town last night, as do excerpts from the slide show, and other slide show works from throughout Goldin's career. 

The Oscar-nominated film serves as both a biography of the artist and her work, but also of her activism, specifically in battling to have museums prevent allowing the Sackler family to whitewash their reputation through donations. The most powerful sequences are when Goldin and other survivors of the opiate crisis confront the billionaire Sacklers during a Perdue Pharma bankruptcy hearing over Zoom. 

One of the best known images from the book is a self portrait from 1984 of the artist with two black eyes, after being beaten by her boyfriend, who appears on the cover of the book with her. In All the Beauty and the Bloodshed Goldin describes the assault in agonizing detail. He punched her in the face, in the nose, but ultimately seemed to be directing his rage at the photographer's eyes. A friend arrived and the beating stopped. "She saved my life," Goldin recounts. 

She also describes how this ex-boyfriend tried to prevent the book from being published, as did her father. Her parents worried that the recounting of her older sister's suicide would implicate them. 

"I think the wrong things are kept private," Goldin says in the film, a common refrain from panel discussions and interviews with the artist. 

In the introduction to the book she writes "I sometimes don't know how I feel about someone until I take his or her picture... I want the people in my pictures to stare back. I want to show exactly what my world looks like, without glamorization, without glorification."