The Ballad of Sexual Dependency by Nan Goldin

“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the diary I let people read. The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember.” —Nan Goldin

“Titled after a song in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, Goldin’s Ballad is itself a kind of downtown opera; its protagonists—including the artist herself—are captured in intimate moments of love and loss. They experience ecstasy and pain through sex and drug use; they revel at dance clubs and bond with their children at home; and they suffer from domestic violence and the ravages of AIDS.” —MoMA website

Originally devised as a slideshow to share with friends—set to music by Velvet Underground, Nina Simone, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and Petula Clark among others—Goldin’s project “portrayed her friends—many of them part of the hard-drugs subculture on New York’s Lower East Side—as they partied, got high, fought and had sex.” (Guardian) It was first publicly shown at the Whitney Biennial in New York in 1985 and was published as a photobook the following year. In 2014, the Guardian‘s Sean O’Hagan said it “remains a benchmark for all other work in a similar confessional vein,” and the Telegraph‘s Lucy Davies said it “would come to influence a generation of fledgling photographers, who fell into her truth-telling wake.”

First printing, Aperture, 1986. 144pp. 4to. Fine in blue cloth with unclipped dust jacket, in protective brodart. (0-89381-236-6) [YA3]

$ 350.00