NAN GOLDIN

Created between 1973 and 1986, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is an incisive reflection on gender, intimacy, and power, widely regarded as Goldin’s magnum opus. Forty years after its publication, the photographs not only define the era of downtown New York in which they were made but have also influenced decades of visual culture and artists around the world. Goldin notes: “I don’t select people in order to photograph them; I photograph directly from my life. These pictures come out of relationships, not observation. They are an invitation to my world, but now they have become a record of the generation that was lost. To show The Ballad in its entirety forty years after I published the book is to reaffirm that desire for transformation and the difficulty of connection and coupling are still true to our world. I’m still impressed that generation after generation finds their own stories in The Ballad, keeping it alive.”

Shot in the vibrancy of real life and everyday spaces, Goldin’s formally and chromatically radical approach upended the status quo and helped to move photography from the margins into the center of contemporary art discourse. The Ballad was Goldin’s manifesto and opening salvo in a decades-long career that asserted a new potential for the photographic image.

First conceived as a slideshow accompanied by a diverse soundtrack that emphasizes its operatic nature, The Ballad debuted in New York nightclubs and public art exhibitions before its publication by Aperture in 1986. The first of Goldin’s many books, it is now in its twenty-third printing and remains one of the most formative photobooks ever produced.

This Will Not End Well, a major traveling retrospective devoted to Goldin’s moving-image work, is at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, through February 15, 2026, and will travel to the Grand Palais, Paris, from March 18 to June 21, 2026. Her multimedia slideshow Stendhal Syndrome is on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada through April 12, 2026.