Few photographers can boast a body of work as deep and uncompromisingly honest as that of Nan Goldin. Internationally renowned for her documentation of love, fluid sexuality, glamour, beauty, death, intoxication and pain, Goldin’s photographs feature her life and those in it. Her visual language and “social portraiture” approach not only rejects the conventional limits of the medium of photography, it creates something unique: a mirror of herself, as well as the world. At 14, afraid she would suffer the same fate as her sister, Goldin ran away from home. She discovered photography while living in foster homes in the Boston area. At school she met David Armstrong, the first person she photographed and the one who started calling her Nan. They moved together into a row house in Boston with four other roommates, and as Armstrong started performing in drag, Goldin became enamored of the drag queens and their lives, seeing them as a “third gender that made more sense that the other two,” as she explained in her 1995 documentary, I’ll Be Your Mirror. She wanted to be a fashion photographer and dreamed of putting the queens on the cover of Vogue. When she left school, she briefly attended night classes in beginners' photography. "I basically wanted to learn to use a big camera," she says, "but I dropped out of that particular course immediately, because I am technically retarded. But I did meet Henry Horenstein, a teacher and photographer, who had looked at my work. He asked me if I knew Larry Clark's work so it was worth it for that alone. I saw Clark's book Tulsa, and it had a huge impact on me." In part a love poem to the bohemian life style of young people in New York City, it is also a melancholy meditation on the joys and terrors of romantic relationships, both straight and gay. – The New York Times

Alyssa's glance at 3 weeks old, Paris, 2010. Photograph: Nan Goldin, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery Bringing together portraiture from modern painters and setting them against historic depictions, this exhibition looks at how the idea of family has transformed in the past 50 years And so my last statement in the book is, “Will voodoo ever work on digital photography?” The reason I call it Diving for Pearls is that David [Armstrong] used to say getting a good picture is like diving for pearls. You take a thousand pictures to get a good one, like oysters with the rare pearl. It’s true, and I used to say I’m not a good photographer. If anyone took as many pictures as I do, they’d be standing up here, too. It’s a lot to do with generosity, just taking thousands and thousands of pictures, and then where the art comes in is the editing. People always have these fantasies of bohemias, art worlds, and these communities of people. In fact, people create their own communities to support the work they’re doing—and here people got to see it celebrated in this kind of glamorous way. Elle Pérez: I teach The Ballad every semester. And I create this fake slideshow for my students. I’ve scanned the entirety of the book. We put it up on the screen, and we play it in the dark, and I use a playlist for the music.Goldin began taking photographs while studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the early 1970s, where her teacher, the photographer Henry Horenstein, introduced her to Larry Clark’s brooding shots of teenage drug use, violence and sexuality in suburban America. Goldin, who was born in 1953 in Boston, left home aged 15, four years after her eldest sister Barbara killed herself, and at 18 was living in Boston with an older man. Soon after leaving art school, she moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to live with the photographer David Armstrong and his lover. There she met the electrifying actress Cookie Mueller and her family – her girlfriend Sharon Niesp, son Max and dog Beauty. Goldin chronicled the summers of partying with the town’s drag queen scene – drawn to the strength of their self-determination – on endless reels of film, which she processed at the local drugstore. In 1978, Goldin moved to New York, where she rented a loft on the Bowery in SoHo for a studio: she continued to record, unflinchingly, the daily lives of herself, her friends and family, in stark, spontaneous records of the ecstasy and pain of navigating life. That’s true. But then it became like Amy Winehouse. I felt such a strong connection with her because, you know, at the end I showed up at some fancy place in Chicago and I was too drugged to finish the slideshow, and there was a huge audience, and I know exactly how she felt when she showed up wherever it was and she couldn’t perform. I mean, I had an audience of 500 and she had an audience of probably 50,000, but it was the same feeling. And it happened to me twice. It’s really painful. I loved that movie.

Pérez: It’s still this confusing thing to many people. It seems a little more accepted now, but I feel like people are still not sure to this day. The book came out in 1986. Reviewing it in the New York Times, Andy Grundberg wrote, “What Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ was to the 1950’s, Nan Goldin’s ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ is to the 1980’s.” Goldin was not unaware of the contradiction involved in her iconic work’s, so wild in spirit, becoming, to a certain extent, institutionalized. For me, “The Ballad” is poised at the threshold of doom; it’s a last dance before AIDS swallowed that world. (Goldin also recorded the AIDS era, in her 2003 book, “The Devil’s Playground.”) “We’re survivors,” she told me. “There’s all this survivor’s guilt. I felt so guilty in ’91, when I tested negative. I was disappointed that I was negative, and most people don’t understand that.” To see Nan Goldin’s photographic series The ballad of sexual dependency is to look at ghosts, a generation decimated by neglect, addiction and government indifference. So why is it so difficult to imagine these figures as anything but alive? There have been a few relapses since, including a "major" one in 2000, when she was prescribed strong painkillers for a serious injury to her hand, but her work has always got her through. At the 2009 Arles festival, she showed The Ballad and a new installation, Sisters, Saints and Sibyls, an ode to her sister, Barbara. It is a characteristically ambitious, sometimes symbolically overloaded, work in which she intertwined the lives of Saint Barbara, her sister and herself. "I brought myself into it as the third character to show the legacy," she says now, "but maybe there should not have been so much of me in there." Heiferman: The book has 127. That was the big challenge. It was clear that Nan wanted to do a book and wanted it to be an Aperture book, because she had an appreciation for what they did, and she wanted to be part of that history. That kind of ambition was, I thought, terrific, but at that point Aperture had never done anything like The Ballad. For me, what I learned when I was working in the ’80s was that you’ve got to make your own opportunities. The way the photography world was set up at that time, it was stratified, conservative, and dominated largely by straight white guys. If you wanted to make friction or make a break, you had to figure out how to do it yourself.

Radical Landscapes

Heiferman: You’ve got to take responsibility for yourself, the way you see yourself, and the way you see the world. That’s a tantalizing and scary thing, but that’s what identifies people as artists. Right? At 15, she had her first show in Boston, which featured a community of drag queens she was then hanging out with. "I wished I could put them on the cover of Vogue, because all I knew about photography came from the fashion magazines," she says, laughing. "I was a good shoplifter and I would steal Italian and French Vogue and we'd pore over them for hours. The queens would fight over my photographs and rip up the ones they hated." Heiferman: Yes, we both worked to line up venues to show it, and I was around when she was editing the slideshow some of the time. That was an extraordinary part of the experience, because while photographers so often work toward distilling a concise body of work, here we were dealing with this expansive, evolving, public, performative, dramatic thing. Some images were always included in the slideshows, but new ones were introduced all the time. Sometimes the chaos of the slideshow coming together—and often in the moments right before we had to throw carousel trays full of slides into bags, get in a cab, and show up someplace and present it—was unbelievable. Seen through her lens, the characters in her drama seem to become fully and inevitably themselves, with their personalities and physical appearance integrally linked. – The New York Times Her early audiences were not the upper echelons of the art world but Goldin’s friends, her eternal subjects. They’d howl and scream at the screen, either because they were so taken with how beautiful they looked, or because they were dismayed by an ugly or unflattering picture. Goldin – who always wanted her loved ones to feel gorgeous and truthfully represented – would edit the slides accordingly. This was also a work that slowly revealed itself to its maker: each time it played, Goldin would recognise new links, loops and repetitions, which informed The ballad’s next iteration. “As powerful as the pictures were one at a time, the slide shows were more than their sum,” writes Lucy Sante in an essay about Goldin. “The transitions from one shot to the next appeared liquid; the pictures seemed anything but still.”