"The Ballad of Sexual Dependency" by Nan Goldin

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As I continue this journey with the OCA, periodically I come across a milestone that reminds me of how far I have come.  One of those arrived through the post a couple of weeks ago, the 25th Anniversary reprint of Nan Goldin's "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency".  In early reading tackling the history of photography and how it relates to contemporary art, Nan Goldin's work appeared again and again, however, I simply did not get it.  Why were these badly lit, oddly coloured, often grotesque images seen as art and why as an exemplary piece of work?

Today, I look at Nan's work and see the immense courage and strength it must have taken to create this story.  I see a work that is both a personal record, but at the same time a damning comment on the sexual mores of late 20th century America.  I enjoy the narrative and find myself visually exploring the lives of the people she portrays. In other words my own experience of art has changed, my visual education has progressed and most importantly I have shed many preconceptions and biases that got between me and a personal reading of the image.

In assignment 1 I turned the camera on myself, exploring who I am and how I feel at this point in my life.  I only looked at a single facet of my world and opened the door for a very short period of time.  In the Ballad Nan spent 15 years chronicling the often abusive and dysfunctional relationships that she and her friends experienced.  Drug and Alcohol dependency suffuse the photographs, violence is used as a metaphor for love.  And yet Nan treats her subjects with great tenderness and respect.  Even very private moments seem to say something about the individual that is deeper than a first reading permits.

There is a very clear thesis at work within the photographs, that men and women although very different need each other, often to the extent that two people might despise one another and still be bound by the sexual dependency of the title.  The images are very carefully sequenced starting with almost saccharine images of couples, through sets that address the nature of men and women, back to relationships without the sugar coating.  It ends in photographs of death.  In the afterword, she reveals her loss, many of the people photographed, although young, have gone, AIDs and drugs took their toll on her friends.

There is much to learn as a documentary photographer from this work.  The sequencing of the images is exquisite, it builds the narrative she wants to portray.  The photographs are not all that technically good, if they were the sense of being there would be lost.  The snapshot aesthetic she employs holds the set together across the many years of creation, maintaining continuity.  Possible with film, I this could be done with ever changing Digital technology.  The key takeaway here is that a narrative sequence of images will hold together better if shot in similar style with similar equipment.  Whilst the photographs make the book, the foreword and afterword bookend the images and provide context within which the photographs can be read.  This is a personal weakness in my work and an area that deserves greater attention of the book is to be the primary creation of my photography.

Before closing this review of the Ballad, I was struck by what Nan wrote in the afterword to accompany this 25th anniversary edition.  It was about the reality of photographs.  The "trueness" of a photograph has been called into question so much that it is now conventional wisdom that photographs contain no evidential value, in other words a photograph is not a true recording of reality.  Nan utterly rejects this idea for her own work.  She sees the Ballad as a record of real events and people that occurred through her life.  She mentions that she started taking photographs when she was so hopped up on drugs and alcohol that she no longer remembered what she did the night before, the photograph became a surrogate memory.  For her these photographs are real.

I find this book inspirational, it shows the power of the camera as a documentary tool, but also the ability to build a narrative from a disparate set of photographs that carries a true societal meaning.  It reveals that an in depth study of society is not done over a weekend or the length of an assignment, but over a life time.  As a student I merely scratch the surface of the possible, understanding my limits is key, however, Nan shows that there really are no limits.