The Intimacy of the Camera: Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Playing now on a screen at MoMa, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency tells a story that is both easy to watch and difficult to sit through.  Ballad is a slideshow of nearly 700 of Goldin’s photographs of her experiences in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, set to music whose lyrics suggest a narrative to the piece. The work views like a flipbook of Goldin’s diary, a stream of projected memories.

Ballad developed over the course of the 1980s out of Goldin’s performances in small venues around the city, in which she would click through her images by hand to a soundtrack curated by herself and friends.  The installation at MoMa, where Ballad is shown continuously throughout the day, speaks to this history.  The curators have included posters for early iterations of the work in the exhibition space leading up to the slideshow itself.  They have also hung photography by Goldin from their own collection, images that later reappear as slides in Ballad.  MoMa’s version of Ballad runs about 45 minutes long, and cycles through birthday parties and deaths, childhoods and heroin injections, lovemaking couples and bruised figures, performers and brides, exhausted naps and warm showers.

One of the most arresting images, also shown as a still photograph in the exhibition, is that of Goldin with two blackened eyes, the white of her left pupil matching the blood red of her lipstick.  It embodies how little separation there is between Goldin and what she photographs.  The rawness of the image, Goldin’s direct stare and exposed wounds, forces the viewer to confront that the person behind the camera is not just telling someone else’s story and recording someone else’s wounds.  This is her very story and her own wounds.

The photographs of Ballad are grouped together by subject so that the viewer moves through tattoos, muscles, pregnant bodies, and drug use as themes in a life.  As the slides march on, the viewer is pulled from one motif to another, which often creates overwhelming moments of saturation by an idea.  During one series, I felt the urge to look away, disturbed seeing image after image of women’s bodies bruised, cut, or otherwise physically scarred.  My experience with that section also made it difficult for me to watch when the slideshow later turned to show a series of photos of aloof men. I almost couldn’t bear to look at photos of the man who turned Goldin’s eye to its unnatural color, her boyfriend Brian who figures prominently in the slideshow.

While Ballad is grounded in a distinct historical moment, recalling the memories of a specific person and her chosen family, it encourages the viewer to universalize its story.  Among the closing images are nameless tombstones carved with just “Mother,” “Husband,” and “Baby.”  Its final shot is a photograph of two graffiti skeletons spray-painted across a New York City door in a close embrace.  I left Ballad thinking about Goldin’s invocation of intimacy, the intimacy of her subjects with one another and her intimacy with me and other viewers.  She complicates the value and benefit of privacy as she exposes what others often seek to hide.  In Ballad, the love, violence, illness, and loneliness of Goldin’s life are laid out for the viewer, who has little choice but to see what she and the artist share.

Gabriella is a senior at Fordham College Rose Hill.  She is double majoring in Art History and English with a focus on Modernism in both literature and art.