This New York view is different from Nan Goldin's roots in the post-punk new-wave music scene, along with the city's vibrant, post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980 and the Bowery's hard-drug subculture. These photographs, taken between 1979 and 1986, and based on using her private experiences as art, form her famous work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.


Nan Goldin, Red sky from my window, NYC, 2000 cibachrome

What began in 1979 as slideshows for her friends turned into hundreds and hundreds of photos, a visual diary that is still being written today, 30 years later, as well as a book, first published by Aperture in 1986 and still being printed. The core of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the record of the tangled lives of a group of friends and lovers and its a reflection on sexual relationships, domestic violence, substance abuse, so-called alternative lifestyles and male social isolation.

Far from trying to glamourise this underground scene for her own gain, Goldin was herself very much a part of it, and made her own tribe and experiences her intimate subjects at a time such biographical work was relatively radical, unchartered terrain.