My name is Nan Goldin, I was born September 12, 1953, Washington, D.C. I left my home and family when I was 13 years old and became close with a group of alienated young people who were associated with drugs, sex, and violence, which later I took photos of in the late 1
970s. In 1986 they were presented in my exhibition The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. I was fifteen years old when I first used a camera at the Satya Community School in Lincoln. I felt like I needed to take photos, It was a way to express myself, especially after the tragic loss of my older sister Barbara, who killed herself. “I had a totally romantic notion of being a junkie. I wanted to be one.”
I was criticized a lot by the media, for portraying drugs as being glamorous and chic. At that time of life, “I had a totally romantic notion of being a junkie. I wanted to be one.” Now I look back and understand that I was just very young. “I wanted to get high from a really early age. I wanted to be a junkie. That’s what intrigues me. Part was the Velvet Underground and the Beats and all that stuff. But, really, I wanted to be as different from my mother as I could and define myself as far as possible from the suburban life I was brought up in.”
From the time I first took a camera into my hands, I understood that It is something that I really enjoy doing. My fame came from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, I took the title from a song in Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera.
“My work originally came from the snapshot aesthetic…. Snapshots are taken out of love and to remember people, places, and shared times. They’re about creating a history by
recording a history.”
“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the diary I let people read.” The photos show my life, travel, my surroundings. “The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember.”A lot of my close friends I took photos of in the Ballad died by the 1990s, some from AIDS, some from drug overdose. Not so long ago I won the French Legion of Honor award (2006), Hasselblad Award(2007), 53rd Edward MacDowell Medal(2012).
Today you can see my work at the MOMA museum in New York, it is open through April 16th.
Ballad of Sexual Dependency
“Rise and Monty Kissing” (1980)
“Heart-shaped Bruise” (1978)
“Party life on the edge”
