Four decades ago, 126 of Nan Goldin’s snapshots of love and loss became one of the most influential photo books ever made.
“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” published by Aperture in 1986, follows Goldin and her friends through darkened nightclubs, daylit bedrooms, and late-night car rides around New York’s East Village, unfurling over time and space to Chicago, London, Berlin and Mexico City. The searingly intimate body of work seems to place the viewer inside the scenes, as she and her friends find belonging and desire and heartbreak. Though the group is predominately queer and was deeply impacted by the AIDS crisis, Goldin has said that her work is often incorrectly misunderstood as being about marginalized people.
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