Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

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At 15, she had her first show in Boston, which featured a community of drag queens she was then hanging out with. "I wished I could put them on the cover of Vogue, because all I knew about photography came from the fashion magazines," she says, laughing. "I was a good shoplifter and I would steal Italian and French Vogue and we'd pore over them for hours. The queens would fight over my photographs and rip up the ones they hated." 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.” At the end of that Provincetown summer, Goldin had image after image of her friends in the dunes, partying, living their lives as if they had all the time in the world. Because there was no dark-room nearby, she used slide film, which she had processed at the drugstore.

The title The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was adapted from a song in Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. [5] [ citation needed]Pérez: That’s why I put such an emphasis on actually showing my ghetto version of the slideshow to my students. There’s something about the participation of it, too. Elle Pérez: I teach The Ballad every semester. And I create this fake slideshow for my students. I’ve scanned the entirety of the book. We put it up on the screen, and we play it in the dark, and I use a playlist for the music. When she left school, she briefly attended night classes in beginners' photography. "I basically wanted to learn to use a big camera," she says, "but I dropped out of that particular course immediately, because I am technically retarded. But I did meet Henry Horenstein, a teacher and photographer, who had looked at my work. He asked me if I knew Larry Clark's work so it was worth it for that alone. I saw Clark's book Tulsa, and it had a huge impact on me."

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. In part a love poem to the bohemian life style of young people in New York City, it is also a melancholy meditation on the joys and terrors of romantic relationships, both straight and gay. – The New York Times 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! In the late 1980s and early 1990s, The Ballad would take on new meaning as a portrayal of a closeknit queer community right before the wave of destruction that was the AIDS epidemic. “I used to think I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost,” Goldin said in I’ll Be Your Mirror. “It wasn’t until the first year of my sobriety that I confronted the reality as I watched a number of my friends die. I photographed some of them while they were ill to try to keep them alive and to leave traces of their lives. It was then I realized how little photography could preserve.”

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

a b c Beyfus, Drusilla (26 Jun 2009). "Nan Goldin: unafraid of the dark". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 27 December 2014. In 2007 Goldin won the prestigious Hasselblad Award. In 2010 the Louvre commissioned a slideshow and exhibition; Goldin titled it Scopophilia and intermixed her own images with those of historical works in the museum’s collections (from figures in Greek mythology to Rembrandt, Delacroix, and beyond)—drawing direct connections between depictions of desire, sexuality, gender, and violence over thousands of years. Photographs by Nan Goldin. Edited by Mark Holborn, Marvin Heiferman, and Suzanne Fletcher. Afterword by Nan Goldin. We spend a further few minutes leafing though Eden and After, and she says she is worried that some of the images of naked children will cause controversy. She mentions the show at the Baltic in Gateshead in 2007, when one of her photographs, Klara and Edda Belly-dancing, owned by Elton John, was removed from the exhibition on the grounds that it was pornographic. Goldin has never, she says, courted controversy, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, controversy has stalked her – most surreally in 1997, when the then US president, Bill Clinton, made a statement in which he accused "Dan [sic] Goldin" of promoting heroin chic during one of the perennial moral panics over fashion's use of skinny, blank-looking models.