Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Few works in the history of contemporary art have so powerfully captured the intensity of peoples’ lived experiences as Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Now entering the Princeton University Art Museum’s collections, this landmark work redefines the boundaries of photography, installation, and time-based media. With more than seven hundred photographs projected in a 42-minute slideshow, this visual diary of the artist’s life offers viewers a historic portrait of love, loss, and resiliency. 

Goldin began assembling this vast document of downtown New York City in the late 1970s, though the work would come to center on the 1980s and its subterranean world of artists, drag performers, lovers, and friends on the fringes of social convention. Without glamorizing or glorifying her subjects, Goldin sought “to preserve the sense of peoples’ lives, to endow them with the strength and beauty [she saw] in them.”1 Her photographs, created without staging or artifice, exude immediacy. Sometimes blurred, grainy, or suffused with flash, they often reflect the volatility and vulnerability of the lives they depict. 

These snapshots of ecstasy and pain, tenderness and trauma, compose the sequence of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Far from being conventional documentary photographs, the images form a fragmented narrative. Figures appear and reappear in different moods, company, and settings, leveraging the agonizing complexity of Goldin’s staccato disclosures to evoke a broadly felt emotional universe of contemporary life formed by the artist and her communities. Characters flicker on the screen in an almost cinematic mimicry of the nonlinear nature of memory. Thematic and evocative symbols link images across time and space: parties, mirrors, embraces, injuries, children. 

Originally conceived as a performative slideshow in apartment screenings, underground clubs, and experimental cinemas, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and its content was initially inseparable from Goldin’s artistic demimonde. In early presentations of the work, Goldin herself operated the projector and DJed the accompanying music, giving the work a living, iterative quality. As Goldin edited and codified The Ballad, its cultural relevance expanded from her circle of artists, punks, and queer people to the mainstream. The slideshow was featured in the 1985 Whitney Biennial and published by Aperture the following year as a now canonical photobook. While individual and collected prints from the series are often displayed apart from the complete work, its original time-based format remains the definitive version. Blending photography, media, and performance, the slideshow presents something uniquely immersive, confessional, and raw.

Throughout The Ballad, Goldin’s photographic style is intentionally unpolished. She used available light and a 35mm camera with flash, producing images that feel immediate and unfiltered. Her subjects appear not as models but as collaborators. At times, Goldin passed the camera to a friend and turned the lens back on herself. Rather than forging a critical distance from the viewer, her images instead offer up a world from within, exposing the interplay between dependency and desire, self-destruction and love. This vulnerability is echoed in the soundtrack, which includes songs such as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You” and the Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale”—tracks that, like Goldin’s photographs, evoke longing, danger, and emotional volatility. 

The work’s title is drawn from a song in the slideshow. Sourced from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, the title underscores Goldin’s central theme: the shifting, often perilous dynamics of romance and intimacy. Her photographs trace the arc of relationships as they bloom, unravel, and sometimes end in heartbreak, including her own relationships with both men and women, capturing the intensity of passion and the deep isolation of abuse. Another poignant thread follows the artist and actress Cookie Mueller and her husband, chronicling their bond from courtship to their deaths, just weeks apart, from complications from AIDS.

Certainly, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency emerged at a moment of historic transformation in American life. The AIDS epidemic was devastating the communities Goldin photographed, while mainstream culture turned away. As a young, bisexual drug user and a close friend to many gay men, lesbians, and transgender people, Goldin sought to defy this erasure of queer life and kinship. Without sentimentality or voyeurism, she insisted on the value of her subjects’ experiences—their vulnerability, their beauty, their rage, their joy.

Rooted in the artist’s private milieu, The Ballad belongs to a broader lineage of art concerned with memory, mortality, and the fleeting nature of human connection. Historically situated but universally salient, it draws on the aesthetics of the family snapshot but upends its conventions, offering not a record of stability or celebration but a chronicle of contingency and survival. At times, it feels like a requiem; at others, a love song. By capturing the urgency of a particular time and place, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency has become a universal meditation on the complexities of love and loss. It stands not only as a key work of photographic and feminist practice but also as a record of a community—and an era—at once ordinary and extraordinary.