Nan Goldin’s photography can often feel like a sunburst. Sometimes, it’s the chiaroscuro of the New York artist’s camera flash, haloing its subjects in a beam so blinding that everything else seems to melt away. Or it’s the fading light filtering in through a window, casting bathrooms and bedrooms – unkempt, grimy, mottled with the debris of life – in an aureate glow. A lyrical documenter of queer life during the Aids crisis, her best-known works are suffused with the texture and ambience of memory: singular moments of warmth against roiling clouds of devastation.
A new exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia collects 126 works from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency – the photographs that Goldin presented as slideshows, prints, and a 1986 book that remains a seminal entry in the American artist’s five-decade career, as well as the lineage of photography at large. It’s the first time the entire set of prints has been shown in Australia, although the slideshow version has played a few times, most recently in 2010.
