I’m not responsible for anything like social media, am I? Tell me I’m not.”
The
photographer Nan Goldin wanted to make it clear that her signature work
from the 1980s — “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” — was not to blame
for our current age of compulsive image sharing.
“It can’t be true,” she said. “But if it is, I feel terrible.”
The
connection is almost too easy to make: The “Ballad” is a confessional
and revealing autobiography in pictures. Set to an eclectic mix of
music, through a 40-minute slide show we follow her and her friends for
about a decade in a movable bohemian feast. They primp and bathe; party
and dance; have sex and marry; raise children and inject heroin. Some of
them die.
The
images are lacerating and intimate — grippingly human. Ms. Goldin has
described the “Ballad” as “the diary I let people read.” One of its
best-known images is a 1984 self-portrait she took after being beaten by
a boyfriend.
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