CNN
By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN
(CNN) — Four decades ago, 126 of Nan Goldin’s snapshots of love and loss became one of the most influential photo books ever made.
“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” published by Aperture in 1986, follows Goldin and her friends through darkened nightclubs, daylit bedrooms, and late-night car rides around New York’s East Village, unfurling over time and space to Chicago, London, Berlin and Mexico City. The searingly intimate body of work seems to place the viewer inside the scenes, as she and her friends find belonging and desire and heartbreak. Though the group is predominately queer and was deeply impacted by the AIDS crisis, Goldin has said that her work is often incorrectly misunderstood as being about marginalized people.
“We were never marginalized because we were the world,” she told the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 2013. “We didn’t care what straight people thought of us. We had no time for them, they didn’t show up on our radar, so we weren’t marginalized from anything.”
This month in London, Gagosian is exhibiting all 126 prints from the book, its first full showing in the United Kingdom. But the “Ballad” extends beyond the book and has been shown in many formats; it actually includes several hundred images and has expanded over time.
Before the book was published, to experience the “Ballad” was fleeting, rare and often, emotionally intense. Goldin originally conceived of it as a slideshow timed to songs by The Velvet Underground and Dionne Warwick, played in nightclubs around New York, and eventually, in the Whitney Biennial in 1985. In this version of the work, the images flash: Friends on the sand at the beach, or splayed together in bed. Their gazes are bright, or disaffected, or longing. Cigarette smoke hangs in the air. Goldin’s best friend Cookie falls in love; she marries; she and her husband die.
“It is a work that I love because it occupies a space that is both photographic and time-based, but it also ends up functioning a bit like a piece of immersive cinema or installation art,” explained Katherine A. Bussard, the curator of photography at the Princeton University Art Museum, which recently acquired a version of the slideshow. “The slideshow originally was really a live performance. So it was the artist standing there, dropping the slides in, DJing the soundtrack…for those who have seen it that way, they talk about the alive feeling of that experience.”
The book is its own form of intimacy, and has its own self-guided rhythm, Bussard pointed out. The Table of Contents takes the form of song titles to pair the music, if desired, and (unofficial) Spotify playlists have sprung up to assist.
Today, we expect art to be deeply personal to the artist, but Goldin was tapping into something novel as image-making shifted across the 1970s and ’80s, Bussard said. There was skepticism that “serious art could be made from one’s own lived experience” and that serious photography could be made in color. Styled like snapshots, the “Ballad” helped break both molds.
“There is a way in which the compositions, the subjects, even sometimes the blur of the camera conjures images that we’ve taken, or that our families took of us that that are the repository for our memories,” Bussard said. At the same time, she added, “people don’t make family albums about heartbreak. They didn’t pull out the Kodak camera to record moments of despair or longing or upset or death… so at the same time that the ‘Ballad’ is leaning into snapshots, it’s also changing them into something more expansive.”
Goldin herself has written on the potency of memory and the senses it invokes, calling memory “an invocation of the color, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavor of life” in an essay that published in the book.
It’s a quote that Bussard has often come back to. “When we remember something, we don’t turn it to black and white,” Bussard said. “We remember things in color, and we remember them often with sound.”
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