The Ballad of Sexual Dependancy by Nan Goldin

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the diary I let people read. My written Diaries are private; they form a closed document of my world and allow me the distance to analyse it. My visual diary is public; it expands from its subjective basis with the input of other people.
Nan Goldin’s photographs stand as a obsessional recording of her life, as she puts it ‘I don’t ever want to loose the real memory of anyone again’. Goldin manoeuvred into a career in art photography after she was given a camera in her teens, a few years after the death of her sister. Her early photographs are taken more as overt play than photographs with a concept of their own. Poses for the camera are taken after the fashion shots of Vogue or Elle and experiments with the new ability to become involved with a glamorised world. But in the act of recording, Goldin discovered the worth of her fantasised glamour world. The hard visual copies of memories acted as a constant presence, a very important story for Goldin to be able to claim as hers and hers alone.
Another point for her recordings lies in the glamorisation of photography itself. Goldin’s work not only records her social life but the photographs move her life iconically into a narrative glamorisation, mirroring the fantasy world of mass media, cinema and popular music. This made the work filmic. Goldin present’s her work as a slide show, at every showing the editing of the photographs changing, a sound track is provided by a backing tape, filled with emotionally loaded music.
The nature of Goldin’s work has created a feedback- just as when two mirrors are held facing each other. Culture built the conditions for Goldin’s view on life, freed from her parents at fourteen she was allowed to experience the cultural and sexual awakening of the Sixties, and become wrapped up in it. Given a camera she was able to emulate and directly become involved in the cultural revolution of her time, by photographing the realism of her life. Later this in turn has reflected back on culture as Nan Goldin has become an important participant of the ‘misrepresentation’ and ‘decontextualisation’ punk sub-culture which has now soaked into the mainstream cultural realism of the Nineties.
The book ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ is a marker of how that sub-culture has been integrated into the mainstream of culture. The book, fore-worded by Goldin herself is a collaboration, edited by Marvin Heiferman, Mark Holborn and Suzanne Fletcher. Its contents depict a carefully choreographed, concise impression of Goldin’s narrative of her life. The book institutionalises Goldin’s work into the frame of ‘high art’, thus placing it into the realm of vast critical comment and making Goldin famous. Could this have been what she was searching for?
The photographs of Nan Goldin which I have chosen have come from the book ‘I’ll be your Mirror’ . This book continues the themes in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency with writings from friends and critical commentators. In the same way that The Ballad is a choreographed piece of artwork, so too is I’ll be your Mirror. It seems that Goldin, in the two books, has tried to recreate the narrative process she creates in her slide shows. Instead of using emotionally loaded music the medium of the book allows her to include letters, messages from people involved with the photographs, this gives context to the narrative photographs on display.
The selection of photographs is an edited sequence apparently depicting Nan’s memories of Brian, a lover of the time between the late 70’s and 1982. The first photograph (fig.7) is what only could be described as a ‘snap’ with the couple looking at the photograph, Nan with a traditional pose for such a photograph, smiling at the camera, dressed up seductively, supposedly for Brian. Brian has an expression of concentration and his pose suggests he is taking the picture, or at least, firing the shutter. Overall this and subsequent photographs in the series give an impression that these were snapshots.
As the viewer looks through the selection they become aware that they are being led deeper into the private life of the couple. In the book the opening shot is positioned on one page, being a portrait, its opposite page blank to separate it form the other photographs. The first photograph has a quality of a snap shot in its traditional sense, the pose of ‘domestic bliss’ that has to be seen in family photographs that does not expose the true feelings of the subjects, instead giving them a vacant smile. The subsequent photographs loose that quality until fig.11 when the violence of their love making is over and Brian stares into the camera with a questioning expression. In this photograph it seems he does not want his picture taken.
In the last three photographs (one of which is fig, 10) the viewer is subjected to the aftermath of the violence in another form of snapshot. In these Goldin’s face is photographed close up, strait on to her face, showing clearly the bruises inflicted on her. It is quite common to see photographs such as these as evidence to a crime or a car crash etc. But as the viewer is subject to Goldin’s life through her art work she has offered it to us as evidence of Brian’s beating.
In the fact that Goldin has chosen this set of eleven photograph which may not have been taken in chronological order (evidence of which is shown in fig. 10 when the room we are led to believe is the scene of the violent love making is obviously not the same room as the photographs before it) betrays that Goldin is ordering her memory of the events, maybe to work through the memory, to classify it, much as the women described in Linda Berman’s book, ripping up family snapshots to place herself next to her parents.
In Goldin’s Photography, like in Sherman’s, the subjects are portrayed as being typical of their particular sub-cultural group. The difference between Sherman and Goldin is that Sherman does not accept her direct involvement as a subject. In this respect Goldin’s work is more like Spence’s, who advocated the use of photography in identifying cultural groups. Whether the photographs of Nan Goldin has been of benefit to the group who she has photographed over the years (and for herself) is impossible to tell.