Nan Goldin 2023

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Nan Goldin presents The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a sequence of 126 Cibachrome photographs, by revolutionary American photographer Nan Goldin between 1973 and 1986.

This series is Goldin's most famous work, and one of the cornerstones of contemporary photography. Decades long in the making, it is arguably the most affecting extended study of a particular set of people and their social and cultural context in photographic history. The Ballad follows the lives of those in Goldin's own immediate community - members of the post-punk, creative, queer scene that gathered around her after she moved from Boston to the Bowery district of lower Manhattan in the late 1970s. As well as detailing highly personal narratives and connections, The Ballad is also a social-historical record—this was a community deeply impacted by the HIV/Aids pandemic as it spread during the 1980s.

Goldin refers to The Ballad as her 'public diary' stating that her photographs 'come out of relationships, not observation'. The work's overriding themes, she has stated, are those of love and empathy and the tension between autonomy and interdependence in relationships—relationships in which all genders struggle to find a common language.

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