In 1985, Nan Goldin unveiled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a slide show featuring photographs taken in New York in the late ’70s and early ’80s. First shown publicly at the Whitney Biennial, Goldin’s intimate portraits of her friends and lovers chronicled the No Wave art and music scene on the city’s Lower East Side. Published the following year by Aperture, the photographs offered a poignant look at the lives of sex workers, drug addicts, and trans people in the years after Stonewall.
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“The photography took me travelling, in many different ways,” Goldin says in Ballads, the Summer 2020 issue of Aperture Magazine. “Most of the time, the relationships came first and then the pictures. Sometimes the pictures came first and then the relationship. The pictures became a way to introduce myself to someone or to become important in somebody’s life. I have often been able to show people how beautiful they are, when they don’t know it.”
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More than three decades later, Goldin’s work continues to inspire a new generation of photographers to create their own visual diaries to love, loss, and community. Ballads features an exclusive interview with Goldin, along with a section of work dedicated to her influences, including August Sander, Peter Hujar, Larry Clark, and Claude Cahun. The issue also features work by contemporary artists Liz Johnson Artur, Daragh Soden, Abdul Kirchner, and Clifford Prince King.
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