When Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency first appeared in the 1980s – around 700 intimate photographic slides, shown in galleries, set to music – it established a new raw standard of self-revelation, in which nothing was off-limits. In it, Goldin documented her own life in the previous decade, the years between punk and Aids, in which she lived as a teenage dropout among New York’s drag queens, when the druggy parties in her loft in the Bowery district never ended. She made the flash-lit slides originally to entertain the friends she photographed. She described The Ballad as “the diary I let people read”.
This picture, Nan and Brian in Bed, became one of the defining images of the series. It shows Goldin looking with narrowed eyes at her lover, an office worker and ex-marine, whom she had met while working in a bar on Tin Pan Alley. She views him naked as a voyeur, subverting the normal dynamics of the male gaze. The pair of them were consumed, The Ballad shows, by heroin and lust and, eventually, violence. On a trip to Berlin in 1984, Brian burned Goldin’s journals and beat her so badly that she nearly lost an eye. “Confronting my normal ambivalence had betrayed his absolute notion of romance,” she said. The disturbing post-coital tension here prefigures her harrowing self-portrait at the centre of the series: Nan one month after being battered.
Goldin’s work is the inspiration for a new exhibition in Paris, Love Songs, which collects images that confront the compulsive and destructive power of intimacy. Few of those pictures have quite the directness as her original Ballad, however, which has been constantly revised and re-edited by Goldin in the years since, the signature record of a long lost time and place. “I didn’t care about ‘good’ photography,” she famously said. “I cared about complete honesty.”
Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy is at MEP, Paris, from 30 March–21 August
