The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.: Edited with Marvin Heiferman, Mark Holborn and Suzanne Fletcher.

1986. First Edition. London, Secker & Warburg, 1986. 25.3 cm x 22.8 cm. 144 pages. With 125 full-page colour illustrations. Original Softcover. Very good+ condition with only minor signs of external wear. Includes for example the following photographs: Nan on Brian's lap, Nan's birthday, New York City 1981 / The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Coney Island Wax Museum 1981 / Trixie on the cot, New York city 1979 / Self-portrait in the blue bathroom, London 1980 / Lynelle on my bed, New York city 1985 / Brian on the Bowery Roof, New York city 1982 / Getting High, New York city 1979 / Skinhead dancing, London 1978 / Nan after being battered, 1984 / Cookie and Vittorio's Wedding, New York City 1986 / Kim and Mark in the red car, Newton, Mass. 1978 / Mexican couple a week before their second divorce, Progesso, Yucatan, Mexico 1981 / Picnic on the Esplanade, Boston 1973 / Scarpota at the Knox bar, West Berlin 1984 etc. "Intensely personal, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is Nan Goldin's visual diary. For more than a decade, Goldin has chronicled her life and that of her extended family in Boston, Berlin, London, and New York's Lower East Side. Along the way, she has created a portrait of her world and our times. Sexuality is at the core of Goldin's work. Her photographs unravel codes of sexual behaviour- codes that are followed, ignored or transcended. Her images are more than one-shot narratives; they are structured for the densest interaction of characters and themes- resulting in a resounding, almost musical creation that resonates with ambivalence and complexity. Goldin has grouped her photographs into potent clusters: women alone and together, men alone and together, children, marriage, coupling, death. She studies shifts in behaviour in relation to social context and creates what J. Hoberman of the Village Voice called a "sexual taxonomy for the eighties." Her work exists in an area between poetry and photo novella, movies and literature, fine art photography, and the snapshot. Goldin demands that the viewer go beyond the surface- no matter how luxurious her light and color, no matter how provocative her mise en scène. She pushes beyond sexual and societal prejudices to illuminate the corners of contemporary culture- without the alienation and condescension of the mass media. Goldin photographs as a participant, and her work is all the more moving for its intimate point of view. As she writes in her notes on The Ballad, "This is my family, my history.""(From cover notes) Nancy "Nan" Goldin (born September 12, 1953) is an American photographer. Her work often explores LGBT bodies, moments of intimacy, the HIV crisis, and the opioid epidemic. Her most notable work is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), which documents the post-Stonewall gay subculture and Goldin's family and friends. She lives and works in New York City, Berlin, and Paris. Following graduation, Goldin moved to New York City. She began documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene, along with the city's vibrant, post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was drawn especially to the hard-drug subculture of the Bowery neighborhood; these photographs, taken between 1979 and 1986, form her slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency—a title taken from a song in Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. Later published as a book with help from Marvin Heiferman, Mark Holborn, and Suzanne Fletcher, these snapshot aesthetic images depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. In her foreword to the book she describes it as a "diary [she] lets people read" of people she referred to as her "tribe". Part of Ballad was driven by the need to remember her extended family. Photography was a way for her to hold onto her friends, she hoped. The photographs show a transition through Goldin's travels and her life. Most of her Ballad subjects were dead by the 1990s, lost either to drug overdose or AIDS; this tally included close friends and often-photographed subjects Greer Lankton and Cookie Mueller. In 2003, The New York Times nodded to the work's impact, explaining Goldin had "forged a genre, with photography as influential as any in the last twenty years.(Wikipedia)