Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

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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! The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, exhibition and screening. Museum of Modern Art, New York. [ citation needed] One of the things that’s so compelling about this work is that you’re making it from within. This is the world that you were part of, and yet you were able to go outside enough in the way that an artist has to go outside to some extent, enough to be able to fully see. You were outside-inside. And those early shows, the ones I wish I could have seen, were often seen by the subjects themselves. Heiferman: Look at Robert Frank and his move to video. Nan has made videos, too. I think there’s this recognition of both the power of individual images or images in a group, and the limitations of them.

Heiferman: You want to see the world through somebody else’s mind or eyes, and Nan lets you do just that. It’s not that she wasn’t influenced by work that came before her. She was, and she knows it, and she has said it—and who wouldn’t be? Nan studied photography enough to know stuff. But what came out was something else. 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.In 1989 Goldin curated the first art exhibition in New York about AIDS, “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing.” Mounted at Artists Space, it included work by Armstrong, diCorcia, Lankton, Morrisroe, Peter Hujar, Vittorio Scarpati, Kiki Smith, and David Wojnarowicz. “I am often filled with rage at my sense of powerlessness in the face of this plague,” Goldin wrote in one of the show catalogue’s essays. “I want to empower others by providing them a forum to voice their grief and anger in the hope that this public ritual of mourning can be cathartic in the process of recovery, both for those among us who are ill and those survivors who are left behind.”

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.” 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? 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.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. It’s a visual diary as you’ve described, but was that part of the initial impulse to photograph, “this wild time, this is going to disappear one day and photographing is my way of holding on to it”? Hujar and Morrisroe had already died of AIDS before the exhibition opened, as had Scarpati, Cookie Mueller’s husband. At the end of her essay, Goldin included a photo she’d taken of a grieving Mueller in front of her husband’s open casket. Mueller, too, would die of AIDS just a month after Goldin wrote the essay. Wojnarowicz would succumb to the disease in 1992. (Adding insult to injury, the National Endowment for the Arts initially withdrew its funding of the exhibition due to its “political” nature, but reinstated it as long as the money wasn’t used for the catalogue, where the “political” language appeared.) In 2022, Goldin was awarded the Käthe Kollwitz Prize for her contributions to contemporary photography. A retrospective exhibition, “This Will Not End Well,” is touring European museums for the next couple of years, with an accompanying book coming in 2023. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the new documentary directed by Laura Poitras, covers Goldin’s life and work, with a focus on her P.A.I.N. activism. It won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival.