Intensely personal, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is Nan Goldin’s visual diary. For more than three decades, Nan Goldin has chronicled her life and that of her extended family in Boston, Berlin, London, Tokyo, Egypt and New York’s Lower East Side. Along the way, she has created a portrait of her world and our times.
Sexuality is at the core of Nan Goldin’s work. Her photographs unravel codes of sexual behaviour — codes that are followed, ignored, or transcended.
Her images are more than one-shot narratives; they are structured for the densest interaction of characters and themes, resulting in a resounding, almost musical, creation which resonates with ambivalence and complexity.
Nan Goldin has grouped her photographs into potent clusters: women alone and together, men alone and together, children, marriage, coupling, death. She studies shifts in behaviour in relation to social context and creates what J. Hoberman of the Village Voice called a ‘sexual taxonomy for the eighties’.
Her work exists in an area between poetry and photo-novella, movies and literature, fine art photography and the snapshot. Nan Goldin demands that the viewer go beyond the surface — no matter how luxurious her light and colour, no matter how provocative her mise-enscène. She pushes beyond sexual and social prejudices to illuminate the corners of contemporary culture, but without the alienation and condescension of the mass media. Nan Goldin photographs as a participant, and her work is all the more moving for its intimate point of view. As she writes in her notes on The Ballad, ‘this is my family, my history’.
Mark Holborn in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Aperture, 1986.