Nan Goldin’s diaristic photographs recording the deeply personal experiences of her friends and lovers—her chosen family—are marked by an often moving sense of intimacy. This is suggested in the way her camera intrudes into the physical, emotional and psychic space of her subject—giving rise to an uncomfortable viewing experience that can walk the line between voyeurism and empathy.

Nan after being battered 1984 comes from Goldin’s series The ballad of sexual dependency, a title borrowed from a song in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper [Threepenny opera] (1928). The series is best known as a slide presentation that developed through improvised performances staged by Goldin at venues across New York City. Friends helped prepare an accompanying soundtrack—one that could shift from Maria Callas to The Velvet Underground. The slide show was edited down to 127 images for a now-classic photobook released in 1986^[1], and the images were also circulated as lush Cibachrome prints. This self-portrait was taken after Goldin was beaten and almost blinded by her abusive partner Brian—an image that curator Elisabeth Sussman describes as ‘the emotional climax’ of The ballad of sexual dependency.^[2]

Goldin was raised in an intellectual Jewish family in Maryland. Her older sister, Barbara, was intermittently institutionalised as a teenager and committed suicide when Goldin was 11. Three years later she left home, living in communes and foster homes, and attended an alternate school in Lincoln, Massachusetts. At this time, she became interested in photography, initially using a Polaroid camera. Goldin took courses at the New England School of Photography, where she was introduced to and inspired by the work of Larry Clark, who had documented himself and his friends shooting up and having sex in the 1960s. In 1974 she enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where she started working with a Pentax, using a wide-angle lens, a flash and slide film to produce work that had a distinct feel: seemingly intimate and ad hoc, with lighting, focus and a sense of colour that was closer to the aesthetic of snapshots than ‘art photography’.

Goldin has spoken many times of the central and essential role that these images have played in her life. They are powerful markers of the subcultures of which she was part and a particular historical moment: the period between 1976 and 1985, when heroin was cheap and widely available in New York, and just before many of her friends and community were ravaged by the AIDS virus. ‘The ballad of sexual dependency is the diary I let people read,’ Goldin wrote. ‘The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember.’^[3] This body of work stands as testament to the powerful role that photography can play in our lives, at its most basic—its most raw and authentic—a testament that no one, she believed, ‘could rewrite or deny’.^[4]

Anne O’Hehir

^[1] Nan Goldin, The ballad of sexual dependency, Aperture Foundation, New York, 1986.

^[2] Elisabeth Sussman, ‘In/Of her time: Nan Goldin’s photographs’, Nan Goldin: I’ll be your mirror, Whitney Museum of America Art, New York / Scalo, Zurich, Berlin, New York, 1996, p 36.

^[3] Goldin, p 6.

^[4] As above, p 145.