“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1979-86) is the diary I let people read … The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember.” – Nan Goldin
Called the pioneer of diaristic photography, Nan Goldin uses still images of companions and acquaintances to create autobiographical visual narratives. Her work is not that of an outsider documenting others from afar but is instead deeply intimate, personal, and about human connections. Many of her photographic subjects were close friends, roommates, or individuals who went with her to New York nightclubs and parties.
Suzanne and Philippe on the Train, Long Island (1985) features two people whom Goldin represented in at least one other photograph. It is typical in its expression of the intimacy between the subjects and Goldin as the photographer. Philippe rests in Suzanne’s lap as she wraps her arms around his body in a public embrace on a train and gazes directly at Goldin. The snapshot-like quality of this composition is also characteristic of the artist’s work, as she used flash photography at night in public rather than traditional lighting in a private studio setting.
From 1979 until 1986, Goldin photographed friends, lovers, drag queens, transexual people, those with drug addictions, friends living with HIV/AIDS, and others from the underground cultures of New York, Boston, and Berlin. These photographs constitute her most famous series, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a personal narrative created from the artist’s own experiences. This photograph of Suzanne and Philippe is just one of around 700 images she captured to chronicle relationships, power, abuse, drug addiction, identity, autonomy, and sexuality. Like still frames of film, these images were set to music and toured nightclubs during the mid-1980s in the United States and Europe. A selection of 127 photographs from the series was published as a book of the same name in 1986. More recently (2016), New York’s Museum of Modern Art exhibited these 700 photographs in the exhibition Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which set the images to music; an homage to their initial multisensory nightclub displays.
— Dr. Christina Larson, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow for Academic Engagement, University of Miami Libraries and Lowe Art Museum.
