The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency

Published by Aperture in 1986, Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, with its fresh, unflinching portrayal of the photographer's circle of friends, dramatically changed the course of photography. Decades on, the series retains its searing power, influencing new generations of artists. Goldin herself remains a bold, singular force in our culture. Recently, she has taken on the Sackler family, shining a light on its role in creating America's opioid crisis. Goldin's trenchant activism is a reminder of the artist's power to effect social change. The Ballads issue of Aperture magazine is organized around the themes contained within the original ballad--intimacy, friendship, community, love, sex, trauma, music--while also honoring the urgent role of the artist as a force for cultural and social change.

This is an expanded and updated version of Nan Goldin's seminal book The Other Side, originally published in 1993. There will be a revised introduction by Goldin, and for the first time the voices of those whose stories are represented. Now being released at a time when the discourse around gender and sexual orientation is evolving, The Other Side traces some of the history that informs this new visibility. The first photographs in the book are from the 1970s, when Goldin lived in Boston with a group of drag queens and documented their glamour and vulnerability. In the early eighties, Goldin chronicled the lives of transgender friends in New York when AIDS began to decimate her community. In the nineties, she recorded the explosion of drag as a social phenomenon in New York, Berlin and Bangkok, photographing their public personas while showing their real lives backstage. Goldin's newest photographs are intimate portraits, imbued with tenderness, of some of her most beloved friends. The Other Side is her homage to the queens she's loved, many of whom she's lost, over the last four decades. The pictures in this book are not of people suffering gender dysphoria but rather expressing gender euphoria... - Nan Goldin

The most significant book to date on this influential contemporary photographer.

Eden and After is a new collection of photographs from one of the most influential photographers working today. For over 30 years, Nan Goldin has created intimate and compelling photographs that tell personal stories of relationships, friendships, and identity while chronicling different eras and exposing the passage of time. Here, Goldin presents photographs of children that capture the energy, emotion, and mystery of childhood. This beautifully produced book features 300 color illustrations and an introduction from Guido Costa, an art dealer and close friend of the artist.

How are photographs understood as narratives? In this book twenty-two original critical essays tackle this overarching question in a series of case studies moving chronologically across the history of photography from the 1840s to the twenty-first century. The contributors explore the intersections of photography with history, memory, autobiography, time, death, mapping, the discourse of Orientalism, digital technology, and representations of race and gender. The essays range in focus from the role of photographic images in the memorialization of the Holocaust, the Argentine "Dirty Warm," and Japanese American internment camps through Man Ray's classic image "Noire et blanche" and Nan Goldin's "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency" to the function of family albums in nineteenth-century England and America.

The Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography for 2007 has been awarded to Nan Goldin. Nan Goldin is one of the most significant photographers of our time. Adopting the direct esthetics of snapshot photography she has been documenting her own life and that of her friends for more than 30 years. Her intimate and formally beautiful photographs focus on the urban scene in New York and Europe in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, a period dramatically marked by HIV and AIDS. Her use of photography as a memoir, as a means of protection against loss and as an act of preservation, and her use of the slide show as a means of presenting her work, resonates in the work of photographers of recent generations.