Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

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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. a b c Beyfus, Drusilla (26 Jun 2009). "Nan Goldin: unafraid of the dark". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 27 December 2014. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, exhibition and screening. Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine. [6] Entitled Eden and After, its perhaps surprising subject is children – or, more accurately, childhood. As its title suggests, she portrays it as a heightened, almost sacred, space. "Children are from another planet," she says. "They know and see stuff that we don't." She tells me she is "ecstatic" about the new book, having overseen its production from beginning to end. Comprising around 300 images taken over the past 25 years or so, Eden and After follows the trajectory of childhood from birth to pre-pubescence through loosely themed chapters with symbolic titles such as The Arrival, The Garden, and the very Goldinesque I'm a Little Girl, I'm a Little Boy. It prompts the question: has the queen of hard-core autobiographical photography finally mellowed?

At the heart of the story is the photographer, who points the camera at herself from the same unflinching vantage: “The photo of me battered is the central image of the Ballad,” she writes. Goldin had been badly beaten by a lover, abuse that necessitated major surgery. That photograph is the hinge of the slideshow, of the book; it is also a visual echo of the loss of her sister, who killed herself when she was 18 and Goldin was 11. Shortly after, Goldin was seduced by an older man, and it’s that tension between pain, loss, and desire that propels her work. Terrified she too would die young, Goldin left home before the age of 15; eventually she moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she became close to the drag queen scene; and to Boston, where she studied with photographer Henry Horenstein, who turned her on to the work of Larry Clark; and to New York City, where the Ballad would take real shape. Now she lives between New York and Europe. Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency The record, begun in the 1970s, of a 15-year period in Goldin’s life, is grounded in a specific place and culture, yet it is a hauntingly universal and deeply affecting work and, decades on, it has lost none of its immediacy 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.” Maggie really politicized me. She is the one who helped me see the work is about gender politics. And I had talked to people in Provincetown about that in the ’70s. After she became involved, I started making it more and more obviously political, to speak to her. Sometimes it was really hateful toward men and sometimes it was really positive, depending how I was feeling. Each showing was different. I made slideshows specifically for people, too. I’d put in a lot of pictures specifically of that person and dedicate it to them. It could be anyone, a friend or a lover. In ’83 I started traveling in Europe and showing it. I showed it many more times in Europe than in America. I showed it in European museums as one-off shows as early as 1983, and in underground cinemas and clubs all over Europe. It was accepted there earlier than it was in the U.S. One of the people who later became a lover of mine in Berlin, he raised his hand and said, “I’d like to be in the slideshow.” And he was, afterward!Yes, the only people in those early audiences were people in the pictures. They were shown at a downtown space run by an amazing man named Rafik who is no longer with us. I think it’s a place to buy film equipment now. But at the time there was a screening room and I would show it regularly there. I’d be holding the projectors in my hands and the bulb would burn out and I’d run home and get another bulb. And the audience would wait. The slideshows were all really handmade.

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. That I thought it could save the person somehow. That I thought I could keep people alive. I really believed it until recently. I would light candles in churches, too. I still do that. And I also thought I could preserve the memory of the person through a photograph. But without the voice, without the body, without the smell, without the laugh, it doesn’t do much. Well, it keeps a memory, but then it becomes a memory of the picture at some point. It’s important to understand when I took the pictures I was not thinking of their later use of preserving memory because I was in the moment—I didn’t know what would be lost! In the week of mourning that followed, I was seduced by an older man. During this period of greatest pain and loss, I was simultaneously awakened to intense sexual excitement. In spite of the guilt I suffered, I was obsessed by my desire. People always have these fantasies of bohemias, art worlds, and these communities of people. In fact, people create their own communities to support the work they’re doing—and here people got to see it celebrated in this kind of glamorous way.I went to Provincetown and lived there through the winter. The way the school worked is that you would show your work three times a year and the teachers would grade it, or they’d give you advice or they’d tell you were making shit. I had no access to a darkroom there, so that’s when I started showing slides to the teachers. And a friend of mine would help me make the music. When I screened the slides at the famous “Times Square” exhibition in 1980, a boyfriend of mine was the DJ. So that was the very beginning of the slideshow. At first it was really just a series of pictures.

Heiferman: You’ve got to take responsibility for yourself, the way you see yourself, and the way you see the world. That’s a tantalizing and scary thing, but that’s what identifies people as artists. Right? Just as Goldin’s career was taking off, she fell deeper and deeper into drug addiction. “The party was over but I couldn’t stop,” she said in I’ll Be Your Mirror. “I stayed shut up in my loft snorting drugs, going months without seeing daylight.” She entered a rehab clinic outside Boston and got sober in 1988. When she returned to New York, she found that many of her friends had contracted AIDS.She was a cross between Tobacco Road and a Hollywood B-Girl, the most fabulous woman I’d ever seen. . . . That summer I kept meeting her at the bars, at parties and at barbecues with her family—her girlfriend Sharon, her son Max, and her dog Beauty. Part of how we got close was through me photographing her—the photos were intimate and then we were. 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 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.

Alyssa's glance at 3 weeks old, Paris, 2010. Photograph: Nan Goldin, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery 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. Cookie with Max, at my birthday party, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1976. Photograph: Nan Goldin , courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery All I made were individual prints until 1978 except the ones I showed for credit. At my school, every year you’d hang your work in this huge armory in Boston as an installation, and if you won a prize you’d get money to travel. At that point I started making color prints and showing them on the wall, and I got the travel money and I went to London. There’s a series a museum wants to buy—it’s lots of skinheads that I was hanging out with then. The two months in London were some of the wildest times in my life. Literally. And I documented the whole thing. But I was always inside the work. It was never strangers. Even the skinheads. It wasn’t like I went out looking for skinheads. I stayed with them briefly until they became the soldiers for the National Front. I witnessed that. In that period I lived a really wild life. Much wilder than anybody knows. 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."

Friends and Lovers

When she showed up again, it was with a crate full of pictures, scores of them, which we went through. They confirmed to me that what Nan was up to was phenomenal. There was nothing like it. It was clear as day. Spread from the original maquette of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, ca. 1985