A photobook classic, and perhaps the work for which New York photographer Nan Goldin remains best known, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the struggle for intimacy and understanding between friends and lovers collectively described by Goldin as her “tribe.” Her work describes a late 1970s/early 1980s New York now long gone, and a world that is visceral and seething with life. As Goldin writes: “Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavor of life.”

Dopo aver visto per anni le singole foto e gli slide-show (progetto originario, a ben vedere), la forma del libro dà ordine, con le sue parti e sequenze a questo materiale. A ragione uno dei libri fotografici più importanti della storia e, a mio avviso, uno dei più seminali e generativi (se Goldin segue Arbus - forse - oggi non si contano gli epigoni di Goldin). ( )

I finally bought it ❤️ ( )

I should preface this reviewlet with a little surgeon general's warning: I know jack about photography. Never taken a class in it, don't often buy books about it, have a very basic little digicam, and I've never really covered much photography in my art history classes either (I think I was comatose on the floor the day we went over it in Ms. Brittle's class or else absent on a "sick day".) That being said, I absolutely love Nan Goldin's work. She is one of the few photographers whose prints I would love having on my wall. She doesn't have many cheesy shots of decrepit trees or nymphettes wearing pearls and looking over their shoulders and shit; instead Goldin is a master at capturing relationships between people. In that respect, she reminds me a lot of David Hockney's portraiture. Goldin reveals moments of tenderness, sensuality, and brutality, often in the same image. She is famous for her images of couples from different walks of life, and rightly so: these are outstanding. Goldin was also one of the few photographers to cover the sad introitus of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s from the ground; many of her closest friends fell victim to the virus. Goldin's photographs at this period are heartbreaking--somehow melancholic in their stoicism and extremely visceral. You feel like you're in the room with the people standing over their friend's hospital bed, and you can almost smell the sickness on his breath as he lays dying. These images are now decades old, but they convey an immediacy that I've seldom seen in such an emotionally heavy subject matter. I recommend Nan Goldin's work to anyone--whether you're interested in photography, or, like me, are an idiot about photography and are open to something new and inspiring. ( )

This is Nan Goldin's visual diary of color photographs taken of lovers, friends, and family during the late 1970's and most of the 1980's NYC, England, and Germany. The title of the book shares its name with the song from Kurt Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper (The Three Penny Opera), "Die ballade von der sexuellen hörigkeit". The pictures are raw, focusing on the often volatile intimacy that exists between men and women, made even more volatile by the booze and drugs that litter the floors of cheap motels. The tired, blood-shot eyes of her sullen subjects gaze unsteadily at you. Their bodies are young yet languid and thin-- from too much dope, too much fucking, too much life. The intensity, however, is softened by a vulnerability that is difficult for me to describe beyond that very word. Goldin says in the brief introduction of her book words that resonate heavily with me: "I have a strong desire to be independent, but at the same time craving for the intensity that comes from interdependency. The tension this creates seems to be a universal problem: the struggle between autonomy and dependency." This is an arresting work, bright with the colors of friendship, family, lovers, and freedom. It is rendered darkly, however, by the red lights of after-hours bars and the shadows of impending death from drug overdose, suicide, and AIDS. The crumbling walls in these empty rooms are haunting. The pictures are beautiful because they are visceral and much too real. ( )