Nearly half a century has passed, and at least one of its subjects is dead, but this photograph by Nan Goldin feels as vital as the night it was taken – at a purple-hued bar in Boston, in 1978 – and later, when Goldin displayed it in New York clubs and galleries with other slides from her seminal series, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, to music by the Velvet Underground, Nina Simone and Charles Aznavour. The Ballad was published as a photobook in 1986 and has been reissued many times since. Its influence on visual culture is hard to overstate.
“I don’t select people in order to photograph them; I photograph directly from my life,” Goldin wrote recently, and the series – which is currently on show at the Gagosian in London, the first time it’s been presented in its entirety in the UK – provides the most intimate and upfront evidence of that statement. In bars, bedrooms and bathrooms, members of Goldin’s circle – drag queens, hustlers, sex workers, artists – make out, get high and sleep it off. The starkness of the images, flash-lit and often out of focus, was almost as shocking as their in-your-face candour about sex, drugs, domestic violence and death.
The woman in the foreground, breathing smoke into the glitterball air, is Robin; the man behind her in the leather jacket is Kenny. The Ballad’s captions give first names only, but the latter is Kenny Angelico, whom Goldin met on the drag scene in Boston in the early 1970s and who later moved to New York, working as a designer at the underground art and fashion space Jungle Red Studios in Tribeca. He died in 1989 of Aids, which ripped through Goldin’s social scene during the period when the series was being photographed (1973 to 1986), killing many of her closest friends. This document of a time of extraordinary creativity and community, as well as hedonism and excess, is also a record of its devastation.
“The pictures in The Ballad haven’t changed,” Goldin wrote in 2022, listing some of the friends who featured heavily in it. “But Cookie [Mueller] is dead. David [Armstrong] is dead. Greer [Langton] is dead. Kenny is dead. I talk to them all the time, but they don’t talk back any more. Mourning doesn’t end, it continues and it transmutes. This book is now a volume of loss, as well as a ballad of love.”
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency by Nan Goldin is at Gagosian’s Davies Street gallery, London W1, until 21 March