BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 10 x 9 in. / 144 pgs / 130 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 10/31/2012 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION Contact Publisher Catalog:
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781597112086TRADE List Price: $50.00 CAD $60.00
AVAILABILITY Not Available
This twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Nan Goldin’s celebrated and influential photobook features new image separations using state-of-the-art technologies.
 
 
APERTURE
Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
Published by Aperture Edited by Marvin Heiferman, Mark Holborn, Suzanne Fletcher. Text by Nan Goldin.
First published in 1986, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the struggles for intimacy and understanding among the friends and lovers whom Goldin describes as her “tribe.” These photographs described a lifestyle that was visceral, charged and seething with a raw appetite for living, and the book soon became the swan song for an era that reached its peak in the early 1980s. Twenty-five years later, Goldin’s lush color photography and candid style still demand that the viewer encounter their profound intensity head-on. As she writes: “Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound and physical presence, the density and flavor of life.” Through an accurate and detailed record of Goldin’s life, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency records a personal odyssey as well as a more universal understanding of the different languages men and women speak. The book’s influence on photography and other aesthetic realms has continued to grow, making it a classic of contemporary photography. This anniversary edition features all-new image separations produced using state-of-the-art technologies and specially prepared reproduction files, which offer a lush, immersive experience of this touchstone monograph. Nan Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., in 1953, and grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her first solo show was held in Boston in 1973. She moved to New York in 1979, where she began documenting the city’s gay and transvestite scenes and developed the informal snapshot aesthetic for which she is celebrated today. Goldin was the 2007 recipient of the Hasselblad Award.
Featured image is reproduced from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Out Magazine
While many have since emulated Goldin's style, few can achieve the striking familiarity and emotional depth evoked by the master herself.
The New York Times
Andy Grundberg
What Robert Frank’s The Americans was to the 1950s, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is to the 1980s…Goldin…has created an artistic masterwork that tells us not only about the attitudes of her generation, but also about the times in which we live.
Artforum
Lisa Liebmann
Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a beggar’s opera of recent times. Here were real thieves and unexpected heroes, and a sense that some things in life might still be worth a brawl.
The Village Voice
J. Hoberman
Ballad of Sexual Dependency is at once a diary and a soap opera, an unerring portrait of a particular East Village bohemia and a sexual taxonomy for the ‘80s.
The New Yorker
Hilton Als
The images are not explorations of the world in black-and-white, like Arbus’s, or artfully composed shots… What interests Goldin is the random gestures and colors of the universe of sex and dreams, longings and breakups-- the electric reds and pinks, deep blacks and blues that are integral to The Ballad’s operatic sweep.
"When I look at Ballad now, it feels like a big life I’ve lived. But, I’ve had a number of lives. I spent two years in solitude, just doing drugs, from 1986 to 1988, after the book came out. I didn’t leave my studio in the Bowery, and I just did drugs all day and all night and that’s it. Any time I left the house, it was to cop, but mostly I had somebody to cop for me. So I had no contact with anyone. I never listened to the answering machine—I still have those tapes I never listened to.
Then, I went into detox, which was like B.C. and A.D. It was that much of a dividing line. I didn’t know who I was at all. I had not been sober for more than one morning in twenty years, and I thought that sobriety was going to be like that morning. I had no idea that I would not have any idea of who I was. It was terrifying. My friend—since we were fourteen—David Armstrong, walked me through that. He was able to help me get back into my skin, and find my sense of humor again. David is the keeper of my history, my memory...
I look at Ballad and see the dynamics of both love and hate, tenderness and violence, as well as all kinds of ambivalence in relationships… In a way, the picture of the heart-shaped bruise could be the symbol of the whole book."
- Nan Goldin, excerpted from new Afterward to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency .
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FORMAT: Hbk, 10 x 9 in. / 144 pgs / 130 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $50.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $60 ISBN: 9781597112086 PUBLISHER: Aperture AVAILABLE: 10/31/2012 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: No longer our product AVAILABILITY: Not Available
Published by Aperture. Edited by Marvin Heiferman, Mark Holborn, Suzanne Fletcher. Text by Nan Goldin.
First published in 1986, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the struggles for intimacy and understanding among the friends and lovers whom Goldin describes as her “tribe.” These photographs described a lifestyle that was visceral, charged and seething with a raw appetite for living, and the book soon became the swan song for an era that reached its peak in the early 1980s. Twenty-five years later, Goldin’s lush color photography and candid style still demand that the viewer encounter their profound intensity head-on. As she writes: “Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound and physical presence, the density and flavor of life.” Through an accurate and detailed record of Goldin’s life, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency records a personal odyssey as well as a more universal understanding of the different languages men and women speak. The book’s influence on photography and other aesthetic realms has continued to grow, making it a classic of contemporary photography. This anniversary edition features all-new image separations produced using state-of-the-art technologies and specially prepared reproduction files, which offer a lush, immersive experience of this touchstone monograph. Nan Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., in 1953, and grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her first solo show was held in Boston in 1973. She moved to New York in 1979, where she began documenting the city’s gay and transvestite scenes and developed the informal snapshot aesthetic for which she is celebrated today. Goldin was the 2007 recipient of the Hasselblad Award.