Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Nan Goldin began photographing at the age of fifteen. She received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1977. In 1978 she moved to New York, where she continued to document her "extended family." These photographs, along with those taken in London, Berlin, and Provincetown, Massachusetts, became the subject of her slide shows and first book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). Goldin's other books include The Other Side (1993), Ten Years After (1997), and The Beautiful Smile (2008). In 1985 her work was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's biennial. A decade later, in 1996, a major retrospective of her work opened at the Whitney, and toured to museums throughout Europe. That same year a documentary about her life and work, I'll Be Your Mirror, made in collaboration with Edmund Coulthard, was awarded a Teddy Award for Best Essay at the Berlin Film Festival. In 2001 a second retrospective of her work, Le Feu Follet, was held at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and toured internationally as The Devil's Playground. In 2006, Goldin was awarded the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. And, in 2007, she received the Hasselblad Award in Photography. Goldin's most recent slide show, Scopophilia, was commissioned by the Louvre and shown there in 2010. Goldin lives in Berlin, Paris, and New York.

Ballad of Sexual Dependency is at once a diary and a soap opera, an unerring portrait of a particular East Village bohemia and a sexual taxonomy for the '80s. -The Village VoiceNan 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. -????ArtforumWhat Robert Frank's The Americans was to the 1950s, Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is to the 1980s Goldin has created an artistic masterwork that tells us not only about the attitudes of her generation, but also about the times in which we live. -Andy Grundberg, The New York TimesSeen through her lens, the characters in her drama seem to become fully and inevitably themselves, with their personalities and physical appearance integrally linked. -The New York TimesIn 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 TimesIt is no exaggeration to describe Nan Goldin's monumental slide show, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, as one of the most important photographic works of recent years. -The New York Times