Photographic Inspirations: Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986)

For Chris Boot, the publication of Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in 1986 represented a watershed moment in the history of photography:

It was like the old values of reportage—of the detached observer, so to speak—were signaled at an end by Nan and her diaryesque work, her snapshot aesthetic, her relationship with her subjects. …. I’m contrasting a scenario where, for a period, it was what photographers photographed that mattered, changing to one where who they were and their photographic attitude was what mattered. And what mattered to them was that value was placed on their work in the gallery, museum, and among collectors, rather than just in the media. It was a major shift. 

For Boot then, the most important quality of the work was the way in which each image explicitly situates the photographer in relation to the subject. In other words, Goldin is an integral part of the world she depicts. It’s the opposite of the kind of attempted self-erasure that’s been a constant theme of the earlier books I’ve discussed. As Goldin puts it in the introduction to the Ballad:

The instant of photographing, instead of creating distance, is a moment of clarity and emotional connection for me. There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party.  

In fact, Goldin conceptualises photography in terms of touching as much as looking. From an interview a few years after the Ballad was published:

 
For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody – it’s a caress. I’m looking with a warm eye, not a cold eye. I’m not analyzing what’s going on – I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.

For me this was a revolutionary idea, one that is echoed several times in the text of Push Process.  

There’s an even more obvious difference to the other works we’ve been reviewing. Goldin’s work is in colour: in fact, all the images in the book were taken on 35mm slide film (or almost all – a couple presented in square format may have been shot on medium-format). So not only colour, but vivid, saturated colour. Most of the images were also shot at night or in interior locations, using flash. So they are mostly lit uniformly and frontally, and without any of the variations in the tones of natural light prized by more traditional art and landscape photographers. As Goldin explained:

 
I didn’t have any knowledge of light, consciously – none – … I lived in the dark, I lived by night. I had no idea that light changed in the course of a day. I didn’t spend enough time outside to know that. …. All those pictures, from 1978 to 1988, during those first ten years in New York – were all taken inside. …. in those years I thought available light meant whatever light was available – like whatever light bulb was on, or whatever red light lit an after-hours bar.

 
So everything appears caught in the headlights, exaggerated and isolated from a wider context, part of a private world.

 
Another difference with all the work we’ve considered so far is that most of the images were shot with a wide-angle lens, though in the context of the 70s and 80s (or even the 60s) that is less distinctive. But it means everything’s close in, and the frame always feels full, with subjects plunging towards or away from us.

 
The example of Evans and Frank (reiterated by books like The New West) had suggested that ‘serious’ photobooks presented the work with one image per spread: each image was encountered as an independent statement before one considered its place in the larger whole. But this approach remains relatively unusual in the history of photobooks, not least because it doesn't make efficient use of paper. Goldin instead followed the – more obvious and pragmatic – model of Brassaï (and many other books), with one image per page, and images thus (mostly) arranged in pairs, with the exception that the several individual ‘chapters’ of Goldin’s work are separated by a blank page, so that each commences with a spread with a single image on the recto.

The thematic unity of these chapters is fairly obvious and often quite straightforward: a sequence of images of heterosexual couples, followed by one of women alone, then men alone, men with other men, a short subsequence showing the traumatic consequences of desire, which is followed in the same chapter by images of women with other women; and so on. The relationships between pairs are often equally clear: two facing images of women in bathrooms (each room with a different colour cast), two of women looking at their reflections in mirrors, or two of men lost in contemplation. Usually, the pairings complement or echo each other, rather than contradicting or contrasting – this is perhaps in keeping with Goldin's affirmative goal of celebrating her subjects. 

The larger subject, as this summary suggests, is not just sexuality and desire, but all aspects of the various relations between the sexes, including male-male and female-female friendships. And more broadly still, gender roles and expectations, and the way these are performed, often in destructive or even violent ways. Presenting the images in pairs therefore makes sense in the context of a book about the various forms of sociability and social intercourse. The images don't exist in isolation: they speak to one another.

Although the table of contents does not title the chapters, it splits them into shorter subsections, each named with a song title, which Goldin uses to point to various aspects of this larger theme, which she also writes about in the introduction to the Ballad:

 
As children, we’re programmed into the limitations of gender distinction: little boys to be fighters, little girls to be pretty and nice. But as we grow older, there’s a self-awareness that sees gender as a decision, as something malleable. You can play with the traditional options – dressing up, cruising in cars, the tough posturing – or play against the roles, by displaying your tenderness or toughness to contradict stereotypes. When I was fifteen, the perfect world seemed a place of total androgyny, where you wouldn’t know a person’s gender until you were in bed with him or her. I’ve since realized that gender is much deeper than style. Rather than accept gender distinction, the point is to redefine it.

 
The book’s Wikipedia page defines the milieu as ‘a portion of New York City's No wave music and art scene, the post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the heroin subculture of the Bowery neighborhood, and Goldin's personal family and love life.’ There are occasional excursions away from New York to London and Germany or Boston, the last where Goldin went to art school and began the project before moving to New York. But while the book includes gay and transsexual experience, at this point in Goldin's publishing career the focus is more on heterosexual desire and homosocial friendship.

 
In any case, the drama is heightened by taking place in the context of a defined subculture. Luc (now Lucy) Sante, a fellow member of this world, described its dynamics:

 
One took drugs for fun, or maybe to stop up grief or despair, but most often to build a personality that could be taken out into the night. People who in other times and places were bookish or mousy or invisible could fleetingly become stars, if only in their own minds. Drugs were an inner makeup. …. [Nan] valued emotional honesty, pursuing it way beyond many people’s limits …. To hang around with Nan was to enter a state of continuous emergency, to be witness if not party to unremittingly intense confidences, confrontations, negotiations, catharses of all sizes.

 
This is also the longest book we’ve encountered. It includes 127 images. Compared, for example, with eighty-seven in American Photographs or sixty-two in Paris After Dark. The body of work of which the book is one iteration originally began as a much longer slide show, accompanied by a homemade soundtrack compilation. So not only do the images depict people attempting to create an authentic performance of the self, the presentation of the work was initially a performance too, presented in bars, clubs or galleries as opportunities arose. The slideshow was constantly evolving: no single presentation was definitive, just as there is no definitive or final truth in the images. Goldin explained:

 
It’s just like a film, really. In a way, the Ballad is a book of film. The slide show is really the original work. Having the narrative voice of the soundtrack gives it larger context than just pictures of my friends. That’s where the relationships between the personal and the universal come in, where I can make more political points about sexual politics, about gender, about relationships. That comes from the juxtaposition of images with narrative, with lyrics. That’s what I’m frustrated about with single images. It’s a way of owning and clarifying my voice and of directing the images, so the viewer can see the images.

 
The unending succession of images in the book, page after page, mimics the experience of the slideshows, and makes it feel very immersive. For the book’s duration, you’re part of this enclosed, largely nocturnal existence with the characters. 

 
Goldin says her early influences, before she was much aware of photographic history, were all from cinema and fashion photography – the latter also concerned with dramatised self-presentation. But one can also place the Ballad in a photographic tradition including Brassaï’s demi-monde imagery, Weegee, Diane Arbus, Larry Clark’s Tulsa, and, above all (at least from my point of view), Ed van der Elsken’s Love on the Left Bank. One might also add the compulsive self-documentation of Warhol’s Factory by various photographers. As with Warhol's work, one reason for the lasting influence of the Ballad is the way it seems to anticipate Instagram culture. 

This is the cover image from the Ballad, 'Nan and Brian in bed, New York City, 1983'. It is a self-portrait, but it is also a portrait of a relationship. Behind Nan on the wall is another photograph of Brian, which shows him in a similar pose to the one he adopts in the foreground here. It was probably taken on the same bed. The version of Brian who looks out from the print is the only figure who appears to meet the camera's gaze, which has here been separated from the gaze of its operator, just as Brian's gaze has been separated from that of his image within the scene. The ‘real’ Brian stares off to one side, also failing to meet Nan’s gaze.

Here, then, the different layers of representation clearly play off each other, but all affirm the coherence of an identity or persona, which is made up precisely of the play between these various layers, and realised in the context of the relationship with another, even if that relationship seems to be defined by a series of unanswered questions: that is, of unreturned gazes (even the image of Brian on the wall only appears to be looking at us).

All this sounds – and is – completely different to the monochrome images in Push Process, which take their cue from the tradition of Evans. But in fact I spent quite a lot of time in-between working on my black-and-white images in Venice also shooting a parallel, sometimes overlapping project on 35mm colour slide film (a technology that was just as obsolete in 2003 as black-and-white negative film). Many of these images were of people I knew; many were also shot outside Venice – in Sydney, Glasgow, Liverpool, Cambridge – while I was travelling, returning to old haunts. As usual, I shot mainly at night, but unlike Goldin, I didn’t use flash, and since the fastest slide films were/are ISO400, the results were often blurred, out of focus and/or marked by lurid colour casts from artificial light sources (flash is balanced to appear neutral on film, so generally eliminates these).

 
Overall, I’d say this project was a failure, in part because it was so obviously derivative – but also because I didn’t have access to the kind of relationships or context that give Goldin’s work its force. But here’s a couple of the stronger images:

So although I tried to assimiliate the example of Goldin into my practice in the early 2000s, none of that work is included in Push Process. Goldin is nonetheless alluded to as an implicit point of comparison for my protagonist, in that a second photographer character in the novel, Merlo, takes images of her friends in Venice, and refers to Goldin (and Ed van der Elsken) as her inspirations. I therefore used the descriptions of Merlo's behaviour to model a different way of thinking about photography.