The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Nan Goldin began making the photographs in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in the late 1970s, shooting the people she lived with and loved in Boston and New York: drag queens, couples, friends using drugs, people sleeping, people fighting, people naked and vulnerable and photographed in available light with a flash that makes the colors bleed and the shadows sharp. The book was first published in 1986 and grew out of a slideshow Goldin presented at clubs and galleries, set to music and intended as a document of a specific subculture and a specific moment, much of which was already being devastated by AIDS. The photographs are intimate without being voyeuristic because Goldin was inside the scene rather than observing it from outside.

This Aperture edition remains the definitive version of the book, one of the most influential photobooks of the twentieth century and a primary reference for subsequent generations of photographers working with self-portraiture, the snapshot aesthetic, and images of queer and subcultural life. Text by Marvin Heiferman, Mark Holborn, and Suzanne Fletcher.