Why ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ is Nan Goldin’s seminal work
Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is widely regarded as her seminal work because it permanently altered what photography could be, who it could be about, and how intimately an artist could implicate themselves in their own subject matter. First presented in the early 1980s as a constantly evolving slideshow of hundreds of images set to music, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency rejected the conventions of fine-art photography in favor of something closer to lived experience: messy, repetitive, emotional, and unresolved.
Unlike traditional photographic series built around single iconic images, the Ballad only fully exists as an accumulated experience. The work unfolds through sequences of friends, lovers, drag performers, addicts, artists, and outsiders living in New York, Boston, Berlin, and other cities. The power lies not in individual frames but in repetition—faces returning, relationships deteriorating, intimacy oscillating between tenderness and violence. Goldin’s insistence on sequencing mirrors the rhythms of real life: love intensifies, fractures appear, damage accrues, and patterns repeat.
What made the Ballad radical was Goldin’s refusal of distance. She did not photograph a “scene” from the outside; she photographed her own life. The people in the images were her lovers, roommates, friends, and community. This insider position dismantled the myth of photographic objectivity. Goldin’s camera does not observe; it participates. In doing so, she reframed photography as a form of emotional testimony rather than documentation. The images feel less like evidence than confession.
The Ballad also broke from the gallery wall. Originally shown as a 45-minute slideshow accompanied by a carefully chosen soundtrack—ranging from opera to pop ballads—the work fused photography with time, sound, and narrative. Music was not decorative but structural, shaping the emotional arc of the piece. This format emphasized duration and immersion, insisting that viewers stay, sit with discomfort, and experience the slow accumulation of intimacy and loss. It anticipated contemporary multimedia installation decades before it became standard.
Historically, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency now carries an additional weight as a record of pre-AIDS and AIDS-era communities. Many of the people depicted would later die or see their lives radically altered by the epidemic. Goldin did not set out to make a historical document, yet the work has become one—an archive of queer, artistic, and marginal lives that were later devastated or erased. This unintended memorialization gives the Ballad an ethical gravity that deepens over time rather than fading.
Crucially, Goldin has never treated the Ballad as a finished artwork. She has re-edited it continuously for more than four decades, adding new images, removing others, and reshaping its emotional flow. This refusal of fixity is central to why the work endures. The Ballad behaves like memory itself—mutable, selective, and emotionally charged—rather than a static masterpiece. By allowing the work to change, Goldin rejected the idea that art should be frozen at the moment of its greatest acclaim.
The themes the Ballad confronts—codependency, domestic violence, addiction, desire, jealousy, love, and survival—were rarely addressed so directly in art at the time. Goldin photographed bruises, fights, morning-after exhaustion, and quiet domestic moments with the same unflinching honesty. These images challenged romanticized ideas of intimacy and exposed the costs of emotional dependency without moralizing. Goldin did not excuse harm, but she also refused to simplify human relationships into villains and victims.
Today, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is often cited as foundational for autobiographical and confessional photography, influencing generations of artists who center lived experience, marginalized communities, and emotional truth. Its legacy is not just aesthetic but ethical. It asserts that bearing witness to one’s own life—and the lives intertwined with it—is a valid, even necessary, artistic act.
Ultimately, the Ballad is seminal because it transformed photography into a space where vulnerability, contradiction, and intimacy could exist without resolution. It remains one of the clearest examples of art that does not explain life but stays with it, uncomfortably and honestly, over time.
The return of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency to London in a major exhibition at Gagosian reaffirms why Nan Goldin’s most famous work continues to feel urgent, unsettling, and emotionally current more than four decades after it was first assembled. Rather than presenting the Ballad as a fixed historical artifact, the exhibition emphasizes its status as a living work—one that evolves alongside Goldin’s life, memory, and ongoing reassessment of intimacy, harm, and love.
First developed in the early 1980s, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is not a conventional photography exhibition. It is a large-scale slideshow composed of hundreds of images sequenced to music, designed to be experienced over time rather than scanned. In London, the work is shown in a darkened, immersive setting that reinforces duration and emotional accumulation. Viewers are encouraged to sit, stay, and absorb the rhythm of repetition: faces reappear, relationships cycle through passion and rupture, and moments of tenderness coexist with violence and exhaustion.
The exhibition foregrounds Goldin’s insistence on photographing from inside her own life. The people depicted—friends, lovers, drag performers, artists, addicts, and chosen family—are not subjects in a sociological sense but participants in shared experience. Goldin’s camera does not observe from a safe distance; it is embedded within bedrooms, bathrooms, bars, and kitchens. This proximity is what gives the Ballad its enduring force. The images feel less like documentation and more like emotional testimony.
Seen in London today, the Ballad also functions as a powerful historical record. Many of the photographs capture queer and artistic communities in New York, Boston, and Europe before and during the AIDS crisis. While Goldin did not set out to create an archive, the work has become one—preserving faces, gestures, and relationships that were later fractured or erased by illness, addiction, and loss. The exhibition quietly underscores this context without sentimentality, allowing the images themselves to carry the weight of survival and absence.
What distinguishes the London presentation is its emphasis on process rather than nostalgia. Goldin has re-edited the Ballad repeatedly over decades, altering the sequence, replacing images, and reshaping its emotional arc. The version shown at Gagosian reflects this ongoing revision, resisting the idea that the work belongs to a closed historical moment. Instead, it mirrors how memory operates: selectively, emotionally, and subject to change. The Ballad is not preserved; it is continually rewritten.
The soundtrack remains central. Music—ranging from opera to pop ballads—structures the experience, guiding emotional shifts and reinforcing the cyclical nature of desire and dependency. In the London exhibition, sound binds the images into a narrative flow that feels closer to lived time than to linear storytelling. The result is immersive and, at times, overwhelming, demanding attention rather than passive consumption.
The exhibition also reasserts Goldin’s refusal to sanitize intimacy. Images of domestic violence, bruises, addiction, and emotional collapse are shown alongside scenes of affection, play, and closeness. Goldin neither aestheticizes suffering nor explains it away. Instead, she insists on complexity, presenting relationships as sites of connection and damage simultaneously. This refusal of moral simplification is one of the Ballad’s most radical qualities, and it remains challenging even decades later.
In London, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency reads less as a retrospective highlight than as a reminder of photography’s capacity to bear witness without resolution. At a time when personal imagery is endlessly produced and quickly discarded, Goldin’s work insists on duration, accountability, and emotional consequence. It asks viewers not simply to look, but to stay with discomfort and contradiction.
The Gagosian exhibition ultimately reinforces why the Ballad endures: it is not about a scene, an era, or a subculture alone. It is about how people love, hurt one another, survive, and remain entangled despite damage. In presenting the work as ongoing rather than complete, the London show confirms that Goldin’s most important contribution was not a set of images, but a way of insisting that intimacy—however fractured—belongs at the center of art.
