Introduction
Patty Chang
Jess T. Dugan
LaToya Ruby Frazier
Nan Goldin
Debbie Grossman
Letitia Huckaby
Deana Lawson
Laura Letinsky
Sally Mann
Arlene Mejorado
Catherine Opie
Laurie Simmons
Carrie Mae Weems

Nan Goldin (b. Washington, DC, 1953)

Upon finishing art school in Boston in the late 1970s, Nan Goldin moved to New York. Shortly thereafter, she began chronicling her social scene in improvised images that included drug users of the Bowery and her circle of punk and queer friends. This photographic style would eventually lead to her pivotal body of work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1973–86, which takes its title from a song in Bertolt Brecht’s The Three Penny Opera (1928), an adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera of 1728—a socialist critique of a capitalist world. Like Brecht’s opera, the works in Ballad, a small selection of which are seen in Diaries of Home, are melancholic. Unflinching in their presentations of the artist and her extended family, the informal vignettes depict Goldin, her lovers, friends, and other couples in states ranging from distress to ecstasy, as told through the lenses of travel, partying, home life, abuse, sex, and addiction.

There is a compassionate and personal side to these and many of Goldin’s pictures that has become a hallmark of her work. Her imagery is often described as confessional; the artist is considered a trailblazer of this photographic style. The photographs in Ballad reveal the struggles of relationships, coming of age, and nonconformity, in the process conveying a vision of family that is rooted in the basic human need to rely on others, no matter how dysfunctional. By the time The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986) was published in monograph form, it was in some ways a memorial; many people depicted in its pages had died, mostly from complications from AIDS, which had become an epidemic. Goldin has since called the portfolio both a volume of loss and a ballad of love.

The pictures in the Ballad series can also be shown as a slide show entitled The Other Side, (1992–2021). Comprised of images taken between 1972 and 2010, the work chronicles the glamorous and vulnerable lives of drag queens and pays tender homage to transgender women. Many of these queens were among Goldin’s closest friends; as with Ballad, many died before their time. By displaying these images en masse, The Other Side pays tribute both to the specific people depicted and to their community. Emerging as the discourse around gender and sexual orientation was rapidly evolving, the artist’s work was groundbreaking. Today, as debates over gender and sexuality continue to swirl, Goldin’s photographs are just as imperative and consequential.

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