PORTFOLIO:Nan Goldin

The Nan Goldin Story is a familiar staple of the romantic mythology of urban bohemia. She is probably best known for “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, a collection of her photographs documenting her life and the lives of her friends, homosexuals and junkies, the poor and the marginalized in the New York of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

By Dimitris Lempesis

Born in Washington, D.C., in 1953, Nan Goldin was introduced to photography at the age of fifteen by a teacher who passed out Polaroid cameras to students at the progressive Satya Community School in Boston. She began taking black-and-white photographs of her friends in the transvestite community of Boston in the early 1970s and had her first solo show at Project, Inc., in Boston in 1973. She received a BFA from Tufts University in 1977 and an additional Fifth Year Certificate in 1978. As she progressed through school, she began using bright Cibachrome prints. After moving to New York, the setting for many of her most renowned photographs, she quickly became involved in the downtown New Wave scene, presenting slide shows of her images accompanied by music at punk rock venues such as the Mudd Club and later at art spaces. The ever-growing body of images she used in these slide shows formed the basis of “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (1980–86). This series, with its snapshot-style portrayals of amorous or abusive couples, drug addiction, and intimate details of the artist’s life, established Goldin as a major photographer when selections were shown at the Whitney Biennial in 1985. It was also presented at film festivals, such as the Edinburgh and Berlin festivals (1985 and 1986, respectively). The life depicted in “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” took its toll; many of the subjects of the series had died by the early 1990s, and in 1988 Goldin herself entered a rehabilitation clinic. She continued to candidly document her life, however, incorporating her hospital experiences into her work. Over time, her photographs moved from representations of destructive youthful abandon to scenes of parenthood and domesticity in increasingly international settings. In 1994 she published “Tokyo Love” a series of images of Japanese youth, in collaboration with photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Produced alongside her pictures of couples and individuals in household interiors, Goldin has also recently created luminous landscape photographs that conjure associations with German Romantics like Caspar David Friedrich.