The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). The image on the cover is "Nan and Brian in Bed" (1983).
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a 1985 slide show exhibition and 1986 artist's book publication of photographs taken between 1979 and 1986 by photographer Nan Goldin.[1][2] Consisting of over 700 images,[3] it is an autobiographical document of a portion of New York City's No wave music and art scene, the post-Stonewallgay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the heroin subculture of the Bowery neighborhood, and Goldin's personal family and love life.[4]
Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said it "remains a benchmark for all other work in a similar confessional vein."[5] Lucy Davies, writing in The Telegraph in 2014, said it "would come to influence a generation of fledgling photographers, who fell into her truth-telling wake. She was credited by Bill Clinton with inventing heroin chic".[1]
It was originally devised as a slideshow set to the music of Velvet Underground, James Brown, Nina Simone, Charles Aznavour, Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Petula Clark among others, to entertain Goldin's friends.[5][2] It "portrayed her friends – many of them part of the hard-drugs subculture on New York's Lower East Side – as they partied, got high, fought and had sex. It was first publicly shown at the Whitney Biennial in New York in 1985 and was published as a photobook the following year."[5]
^Goldin, Nan (2012). Marvin Heiferman; Mark Holborn; Suzanne Fletcher (eds.). The ballad of sexual dependency (2012 reissue ed.). New York, N.Y.: Aperture Foundation. ISBN978-1-59711-208-6.
