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.
“There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party,” writes Goldin, in her introductory essay to the book. “But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.”
With this manifesto, she invites us into her universe of earth-shaking infatuations and glimmering heartbreak, often limned with a startling intimacy. The romantic and the platonic become ambiguous. Friends and freaks of all ilks populate her photographs – skinheads and gutter punks, queens and dandies, rakes and debauchees, always at their least guarded. They are in various states of undress, sprawled across unmade sheets, making and falling out of love with equal fervour. In Canberra, the photographs fill one darkened room – which, in its cocooning silence, feels appropriately numinous.
“Photo plays such a talismanic, extraordinary role in Nan’s life,” says Anne O’Hehir, the NGA’s curator of photography. “She’s very clear that it saved her life.”
Now 69, Goldin was raised by middle-class Jewish parents in the stifling suburbs of 50s Boston. When she was 11, her older sister Barbara died by suicide after periods of hospitalisation – a tragedy which reverberates through all of Goldin’s art, O’Hehir says. “Probably her whole life is trying to keep Barbara’s memory alive.”
For years after Barbara’s death, Goldin “barely talked above a whisper”, she said in a 2014 Guardian interview; it wasn’t until she left home at 14 and enrolled at an alternative school a few years later that another form of expression unveiled itself. A teacher gave her a camera; as the lore goes, she simply never stopped.
Taken between 1979 and 1986, the photographs in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency mostly span Goldin’s time in the queer enclaves of Provincetown, Massachusetts, as well as New York’s downtown bohemia in the 80s. Named after a number from Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is similarly theatrical in sweep, cataloguing the web of relationships in the artist’s life: what Goldin saw as the unimpeachable alienation between men and women, and our addiction to love in the face of certain doom. “I’m trying to figure out what makes coupling so difficult,” she writes in the introduction.
Chosen family remains a potent thesis throughout. Faces of Goldin’s nearest and dearest recur. The performer and longtime friend Suzanne Fletcher features 11 times: eyes closed in momentary bliss as she showers, or gazing out a train window – or, later, tear-stained by Goldin’s bed. The late Cookie Mueller – the John Waters muse and it-girl who inspired legions of urban legends – appears in three variations, each divorced from her public persona. In one photograph titled Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, the actor perches ruminatively at the bar, in between takes of a film shoot.
The sheer proximity between Goldin and her subjects, says O’Hehir, upended decades of photographic tradition which had long prized distance between artist and sitter. “And if you did have an intimate portrait, it was the male photographer and the muse.” She namechecks the classic couples of art history: Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Weston and Charis Wilson, Harry and Eleanor Callahan. “I don’t think it’s that normal before Nan for people to photograph their friends in the same way.” She points to Suzanne in the shower: “Traditionally, that’s meant to be Nan’s lover. And it’s not – it’s her best friend. She doesn’t even make a distinction: everybody’s looked at with a lens of desire, because she wants to make them all look beautiful.”
Even at its most ecstatic, however, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is punctuated with the tang of melancholy. The creeping despair of the HIV/Aids epidemic increasingly colours otherwise joyous photographs of Goldin’s community caught in interstitial moments: preparing to go out, midway through a birthday party, raising a drink to their lips as they sunbathe. “When thousands are dying in New York, Nan is showing her friends just doing stuff beyond being sick and in hospital. [They’re] having kids and playing Monopoly. It’s a simple idea, but to see people like that – it’s very powerful.”
Goldin, recently, has become well-known for her staunch (and successful) campaign against the Sackler family, whose pharmaceutical company has fuelled the deadly opioid crisis in America while donating millions to landmark art institutions around the world. The campaign was documented in last year’s Oscar-nominated film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed – but Goldin’s work has always been political. “I think Nan was probably born with a little clenched fist,” O’Hehir laughs.
Goldin first presented The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as public slideshows in clubs and bars: a tongue-in-cheek revolt in a time where “everyone’s making slides so they can bore each other to death,” O’Hehir says. “Dad’s doing his little holiday slides, click click click. She’s using that very heterosexual nuclear family tradition … and flips it to say: we’re having a family album as well, but it’s my chosen family.” During the slideshows, Goldin would accept feedback from a vocal audience, and eventually winnowed down more than 700 photographs to a slim volume of 126. “People would shout out, ‘Oh, I love that one, Nan!’ Or: ‘I hate that!’ She’d take it out if people said they looked ugly.”
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, then, is both documentary and glorification: a record of queer life which elevates its subjects to the stuff of mythology. There is one notable exception: Brian, the louche layabout who Nan met while tending bar, and who became an abusive lover to her over a relationship that lasted several years.
Brian wields an outsized presence in the room – photographs of him fill the centre of the exhibition in what O’Hehir calls the emotional climax of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. His first appearances are roguish, almost bewitching. “You understand that Nan’s seeing him in that way,” O’Hehir says. Soon, though, his face turns stony, glowering into the lens like a threat.
Then the gut punch: a photograph titled Nan one month after being battered. Blue-black bruises bloom across the artist’s face in the aftermath of a beating which almost left her blind; in red lipstick and pearl necklace, she stares defiantly down the barrel of the camera. “She says it’s important to make the private public: this is the reality, and as much as you don’t want to talk about it, I’m going to put it in my book and you can all look at it … We will not vanish.”
O’Hehir gestures towards Parliament House, a few blocks away from the NGA. “It’s just as important now as it was in 1986 … All that stuff in parliament, we haven’t gone anywhere. The fact that people can still be put through it for coming forward.”
Perhaps, suggests O’Hehir, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency remains perennially relevant as a celebration of the fringes – an arms-outstretched howl against conservatism. “I think the world is becoming a very fearful place again,” she says. “And when you think of how people were afraid of HIV/Aids at the time when this came out – the fear just ends in violence.”
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is on show at the National Gallery of Australia until 28 January 2024. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is streaming on DocPlay
