Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency [Hardcover]

First published in 1986, Nan Goldin'sThe Ballad of Sexual Dependencyis a visual diary chronicling the struggles for intimacy and understanding among the friends and lovers whom Goldin describes as hertribe.These photographs described a lifestyle that was visceral, charged and seething with a raw appetite for living, and the book soon became the swan song for an era that reached its peak in the early 1980s. Twenty-five years later, Goldin's lush color photography and candid style still demand that the viewer encounter their profound intensity head-on. As she writes:Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound and physical presence, the density and flavor of life.Through an accurate and detailed record of Goldin's life,The Ballad of Sexual Dependencyrecords a personal odyssey as well as a more universal understanding of the different languages men and women speak. The book's influence on photography and other aesthetic realms has continued to grow, making it a classic of contemporary photography. This anniversary edition features all-new image separations produced using state-of-the-art technologies and specially prepared reproduction files, which offer a lush, immersive experience of this touchstone monograph.Ballad of Sexual Dependencyis at once a diary and a soap opera, an unerring portrait of a particular East Village bohemia and a sexual taxonomy for the '80s.–The Village Voice
Nan Goldin'sBallad of Sexual Dependencyis a beggar's opera of recent times. Here were real thieves and unexpected heroes, and a sense that some things in life might still be worth a brawl.–Artforum
What Robert Frank'sThe Americanswas to the 1950s, Nan Goldin'sThe Ballad of Sexual Dependencyis to the 1980s Goldin has created an artistic masterwork that tells us not only about the attitudes of her generation, but also about the times in which we lló(