The ballad of sexual dependency is a defining artwork of the 1980s. Nan Goldin’s extended photographic study of her chosen family – her ‘tribe’ – began life as a slide show screened in the clubs and bars of New York where Goldin and her friends worked and played. The slide show was then distilled to a series of 126 photographs, which has recently become part of the National Gallery’s collection.
Opening Event: 3 July 2025
Exhibition Open: 4 July – 14 September 2025
Recently acquired by the National Gallery of Australia from the artist’s personal collection, the John Curtin Gallery is thrilled to present, Nan Goldin’s, The ballad of sexual dependency, one of the defining artworks of the twentieth century. This ground-breaking series of 126 brilliant colour photographs is touring to JCG exclusively within Western Australia. Decades-long in the making, The ballad presents a highly moving extended photographic study of a particular set of people and their milieu. It follows in intimate detail the lives of Goldin’s community – the post-punk, creative, queer scene that gathered around her after she moved from Boston to the Bowery district of New York in the late 1970s. As well as detailing highly personal narratives and connections, the ballad carries tremendous emotional power and continues to influence contemporary artists today.
Goldin takes photographs to connect, to keep the people she loves in her memory. She is committed to the idea that photography can faithfully record a time and place, and do so in a way that has real social purpose. Using a documentary, snapshot style, she lays bare her life in the manner of a family album. We see her alongside her friends and lovers as they live their lives – hanging out, falling in and out of love, having children. But this is a community that would be decimated by HIV/AIDS and drug-related deaths. The ballad has become as much a testament to how much Goldin and her community have lost, as it is a record of the look and feel of a past time.
Goldin refers to The ballad as her ‘public diary’, stating that her photographs ‘come out of relationships, not observation’. The work’s overriding themes, she has stated, are those of love and empathy and the tension between autonomy and interdependence in relationships—relationships in which all genders struggle to find a common language.
Curator: Anne O’Hehir, Curator, Photography
Nan Goldin was born in 1953 in Washington DC, she works and lives in New York and Paris. Goldin started taking photographs in Boston when she was a teenager; capturing black-and-white photographs of drag queens, her friends and family, both celebrating and giving a voice to the subcultural lifestyle of her community. In the 1990s Goldin used photography to record her travels in Asia as well as the troubled lives of her friends, many of whom died of AIDS. Nan Goldin is known as an artist whose output is inextricably linked to her own biography and for breaking down the traditional barrier between the camera and the object photographed. Her naturally lit images document her surrogate family of friends and lovers, and – more often than not – are frank confrontations with personal experiences and explorations of both intimacy and alienation. Following her retrospective at the Whitney Museum of New York (1996) where her slideshow ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ was presented, Nan Goldin’s reputation grew, and now she is recognised as one of the world’s most important living photographers. Subsequently, another retrospective was organised by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2001).
Viewer Advice: The photographs in Nan Goldin’s The ballad of sexual dependency depict the everyday lives, often in intimate detail, of people in Goldin’s immediate community during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Please be advised that works of art in this exhibition depict explicit nudity, sexual acts, drug use, and the impacts of violence against women.
Viewer discretion is advised.
This is a National Gallery Touring Exhibition presented as part of the Bowness Family Foundation Touring Photography Exhibition series.
Header image: Nan Goldin, Nan and Brian in bed, NYC, 1983, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased 1994 © Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin, C.Z. and Max on the beach, Truro, Mass., 1976, 1976, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022 © Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin, Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, New York City, 1983, 1983, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022 © Nan Goldin
