Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

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Goldin had her first solo show in 1973 at Project, Inc. in Boston. The following year she and Armstrong enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (as did Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Mark Morrisroe, who would go on to successful careers of their own); after graduating she moved with a group of friends first to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and then to New York. Goldin had found her “extended family.” With her sister still at the forefront of her mind, she “became obsessed with never losing the memory of anyone again,” she said in I’ll Be Your Mirror. It was this that drove her to constantly photograph members of what she called her tribe. Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you. These are extraordinary photographs, routinely imitated but rarely matched, that hurled the unseen and hidden into public view. Goldin herself has called the collection her magnum opus. The NGA rightly classifies The ballad as a “defining artwork of the 1980s”. The photos invite us to a different, freer way of being, promising romance and friendship that may transfigure or destroy. And who else has managed to squeeze such beauty from the most hideous of hotel rooms? To generate such intense colour from artificial light and dim interiors? “There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing: this is my party.”

Pérez: Totally. I think people in general are struggling with the claim that the camera can take control over a person’s own image. But, then, simultaneously, there’s a paradox, where people are very nervous now to use the camera to stake a claim.The exhibition design is simple and elegant but I wondered if the glamour of the slide show could have informed a more imaginative presentation of this old work. Perhaps it could have included the music that shaped how these photos were originally seen – Maria Callas’s rendition of “Casta Diva”, The Velvet Underground’s saturnine “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and Charles Aznavour’s tale of oppressed gay life, “What Makes a Man”, in which the French singer croons: “I know my life is not a crime / I’m just a victim of my time / I stand defenceless.” No, that’s not true. I started it when I was at art school in the ’70s in Boston. I went to Provincetown and then I decided to spend a winter there. Basically I learned how to drink at art school; teachers at the school collected old cars and we’d sit in the cars and drink. But I learned how to print color. And I’m still friends with people I went to school with there. That was really art school. Since it was founded in 1985, cultural organisation Artangel has made a name for itself staging exhibitions in headline-grabbing locations. Its latest show brings a cast of literary and art-world heavyweights to the cells, corridors and chapel of HM Prison Reading, which closed in 2013

You start taking pictures, and then you start taking more and more, and then they accumulate, and then eventually you start to shape the whole thing. I’m curious about the moment you recognized that this was becoming a body of work, and about how you arrived at this particular form? To see Nan Goldin’s photographic series The ballad of sexual dependency is to look at ghosts, a generation decimated by neglect, addiction and government indifference. So why is it so difficult to imagine these figures as anything but alive? Building on the legacy of feminist art from the 1970s, this exhibition includes photographic and video works by 17 contemporary artists from five continents, from the 80s to today, presenting woman as creator and subject of her work Constantly reedited and revised by her since then, The Ballad... is an evocation of a time and a place and is now imbued with a deep sense of loss that people seem to connect with deeply. At the Arles' photography festival of 2009, which was curated by Goldin , an outdoor screening held several hundred people in thrall. Likewise, in the more intimate setting of a dark room in Tate Modern a few years ago, when it was shown as part of a themed show, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, it proved the most popular attraction. "In my experience, people usually spend five or 10 minutes in an installation," says the Tate's curator of photography, Simon Baker, "but Nan's installation was full all the time. It's the mixture of narrative and music that keeps people watching. She is a master of sequencing. Many photographers have followed Goldin, but very few have produced work that is so monumental in scale and yet so powerfully intimate. She really is out there on her own."In 2007 Goldin won the prestigious Hasselblad Award. In 2010 the Louvre commissioned a slideshow and exhibition; Goldin titled it Scopophilia and intermixed her own images with those of historical works in the museum’s collections (from figures in Greek mythology to Rembrandt, Delacroix, and beyond)—drawing direct connections between depictions of desire, sexuality, gender, and violence over thousands of years. It’s a book of a film, and that’s what it started as. Now it has its own life, and I love it. I want to make films; that’s my life’s dream. I haven’t made that step yet, but I’m about to. I’ve found a collaborator and now I have to find a screenwriter. But that’s all I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid and that’s why I’ve never particularly cared about photography. That’s why photography is easy for me to do. It’s not as important to me to make great pictures as it is to make a great film, which has stopped me all these years. So this is my form of making movies. And Jim Jarmusch told me in the early ’80s that he saw the slideshow as being a little bit like Chris Marker’s film La Jetée, which is also made of stills. It’s not really, because each slide is shown at the same time and it’s not repeated. I mean, I would love to make something like La Jetée, but it’s a lot more complex in the way that it uses the still. In the text for her book, Goldin described The Ballad as a “visual diary” to share with the world. But whereas Robert Frank’s concerns were largely documentary, she was adamant that her pictures “come out of relationships, not observation,” and she included many self-portraits. (A more apt comparison may be to Larry Clark, whose autobiographical 1971 photo book, Tulsa, Goldin has cited as an inspiration.) Goldin wrote in The Ballad, “There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.” Just as certain works of literature can radically alter our understanding of language and form, there are a select number of books that can transform our sense of what makes a photograph, and why. Between 1972 and 1992, the Aperture Foundation published three seminal photography books, all by women. “Diane Arbus” (1972), published a year after the photographer’s death, documented a world of hitherto unrecorded people—carnival figures and everyday folk—who lived, it seemed, somewhere between the natural world and the supernatural. Sally Mann’s “Immediate Family” (1992), a collection of carefully composed images of Mann’s three young children being children—wetting the bed, swimming, squinting through an eyelid swollen by a bug bite—came out when the controversy surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe’s “The Perfect Moment” exhibition was still fresh, and it reopened the question of what the limits should be when it comes to making art that can be considered emotionally pornographic. Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a beggar’s opera of recent times. Here were real thieves and unexpected heroes, and a sense that some things in life might still be worth a brawl. – ????Artforum

Five years. And in the first few years after my shift I would go to an after-hours bar and work there and it was a lot of bad cocaine, and when it closed at 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning, we’d go to breakfast and everyone would be reading the racing forms. That went on for years, and then I started working the day shift at the bar, and that’s when I met the guy Brian who’s in the pictures. I think of them as distinct narrative forms: the individual pictures; the book; the slideshow, which is somewhere in between still and cinema. There’s that word, ballad. It’s a musical form in one sense, it’s a literary form, and especially when you talk about photographs making their own memories, well, you’re reshaping these memories all the time into new stories. Where does, say, the book fit in for you, in relation to the slideshow? Pérez: It’s still this confusing thing to many people. It seems a little more accepted now, but I feel like people are still not sure to this day. When she left school, she briefly attended night classes in beginners' photography. "I basically wanted to learn to use a big camera," she says, "but I dropped out of that particular course immediately, because I am technically retarded. But I did meet Henry Horenstein, a teacher and photographer, who had looked at my work. He asked me if I knew Larry Clark's work so it was worth it for that alone. I saw Clark's book Tulsa, and it had a huge impact on me."

Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990

Photography, as Nan Goldin has often attested, has not only illuminated her life, but saved her soul. "Every time I go through something scary, traumatic," she once said, "I survive by taking pictures." Born Nancy Goldin into a middle-class Jewish family in Lexington, a suburb of Boston, she was the youngest of four children, with two brothers and a sister. The traumas seem to have started early. She was close to her sister, Barbara, who from an early age rebelled against the constrictions of middle-American respectability. "My sister taught me to hate suburbia from a very young age," says Goldin, "the suffocation, the double-standards. 'Don't let the neighbours know', was the gospel. Well, the neighbours certainly knew what was going on in our house, because they heard it." At 14, afraid she would suffer the same fate as her sister, Goldin ran away from home. She discovered photography while living in foster homes in the Boston area. At school she met David Armstrong, the first person she photographed and the one who started calling her Nan. They moved together into a row house in Boston with four other roommates, and as Armstrong started performing in drag, Goldin became enamored of the drag queens and their lives, seeing them as a “third gender that made more sense that the other two,” as she explained in her 1995 documentary, I’ll Be Your Mirror. She wanted to be a fashion photographer and dreamed of putting the queens on the cover of Vogue. Goldin began taking photographs while studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the early 1970s, where her teacher, the photographer Henry Horenstein, introduced her to Larry Clark’s brooding shots of teenage drug use, violence and sexuality in suburban America. Goldin, who was born in 1953 in Boston, left home aged 15, four years after her eldest sister Barbara killed herself, and at 18 was living in Boston with an older man. Soon after leaving art school, she moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to live with the photographer David Armstrong and his lover. There she met the electrifying actress Cookie Mueller and her family – her girlfriend Sharon Niesp, son Max and dog Beauty. Goldin chronicled the summers of partying with the town’s drag queen scene – drawn to the strength of their self-determination – on endless reels of film, which she processed at the local drugstore. In 1978, Goldin moved to New York, where she rented a loft on the Bowery in SoHo for a studio: she continued to record, unflinchingly, the daily lives of herself, her friends and family, in stark, spontaneous records of the ecstasy and pain of navigating life.