Staff Writer Thomas Deakin examines the new exhibit at the Gagosian, an art gallery in Mayfair, of photographer Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and how this famous collection links both to her broader work and to the work of others in the New York arts scene of the 1970s.
In the increasingly digitised nature of the artistic scene of the 21st century, our idea of not just what a photo is, but the potential power of the photographic image created, has altered considerably. What used to be an art form taken purely on traditional analog devices is now a means of expression that is at threat of being stifled by items like the iPhone making the task so much easier, to the extent that 36% of professional photographers use smartphones as of 2021. However, it is the increasing rarity of this art form that has made photographic exhibitions feel even more special, and there are few photographers who used photography as uniquely and as humanistically as Nan Goldin.
Between 1973 and 1986, Goldin, a Jewish-American photographer born in Washington DC who later moved to New York City, created The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a collection of photos that showcased her loving reflections of the LGBTQ+ and often heroin-addicted community of drag queens, lesbians, and gay men the openly Goldin was a part of during the 1970s and 1980s. Although it is a gloriously diverse and complex work that celebrates instead of mocking the unconventionality of its subjects, the work is also tainted with the looming tragedy of the AIDS epidemic that unfairly took the lives of many of Goldin’s closest friends and subjects. Wandering through the exhibition of this collection, it is clear, however, that Goldin wants you to see her subjects as fighters and, most importantly, humans, which is why I think her work transcends the miserabilism and stereotypes that usually restrict works focussing on the AIDS epidemic, in that what Goldin crafts is a beautifully revealing work privileging lived human experience over the inevitability of its demise.
The optimistic humanity contained within these photos was amplified by the experience of seeing them exhibited at the Gagosian. Located in a single room on Davies Street in Mayfair in Westminster, London, the sparse and restricted nature of this exhibit, which solely focused on the photos and only provided background information for them online would have been limiting for less experiential artistic pieces, but the nature of Goldin’s Ballad as a more of a documentation of human experiences than a conventional artwork made this focus on the photos alone an ideal set up. Being alone in a room with just photographic admirers, guards, and the photos themselves allowed the experience to feel more immersive and personal. This personalism was enhanced by the lack of physical descriptions for the individual photographs without using the website, which made the experience more intellectually stimulating by reinforcing a belief I have often had about art, informed by writers such as Barthes, that the art work itself contains more capability of meaning from the reader or audience instead of the pre-assigned context granted by the author.
Upon doing further research, there were some photos I was able to identify that particularly stood out to me as emblematic of Goldin’s humanist take on praising the diversity and sincerity of her often queer subjects. The photographic and especially spatial means that Goldin utilised to depict these subjects ranged depending on the photo. Within the oeuvre of the work overall, many images seemed to be in direct conflict or even oxymoronic towards each other. This was achieved by Goldin often juxtaposing images of immense excess and complete spatial coverage against images of sparsity and an extreme, almost disorienting distance between the images within a frame. By carefully crafting this artwork as not just a series of individual pieces, but an examination of a series of pieces and the interstices and relations between them, I think that Goldin’s usage of a wide variety of spaces reaffirmed how the power of her work is found in the correlation between ephemeral beauty and inevitable tragedy.
An example of the maximalist excess on display in her works is found in the 1978 image Warren and Jerry fighting, London, which depicts a gay couple having a play fight on their bed. Despite the slightly violent connotations of the title, seeing this in the gallery with no context, I was struck by how this image emphasised the central and nuanced thesis of her work, which is that, although it can be chaotic and excessive, there is a certain beauty to the sincerity and passion involved in gay love. This was reinforced by the fullness of the frame, as the items in the flat and the wallpaper of the bed completely subsumed the image to indicate that the couple in this photo were satisfied and felt at home within the chaos of this subversive domestic setting. Upon doing some further research, I did find out that these photos were specifically taken to capture two skinheads, who were part of the National Front in London, a detail which did not diminish what I see as a depiction of gay love within this scene, but did reassert that the pain at the heart of Goldin’s work is a dialectical conflict between tragedy of circumstance and politics and sincere human impulse.
In contrast, an example of the more sparse and spatially disproportionate photographs in Goldin’s collection is the 1981 image Suzanne with Mona Lisa, Mexico City, which shows a tense woman standing in a completely red-tinted background, staring alone at a mirror, separated from her immediate environment. Unlike the more dichotomous and conflicting nature of the London photo, this image provokes an atmosphere of suffocating despair, as the all-consuming redness allows Goldin to amplify the distance and darkness of the photo even further. In addition, the lack of illumination on the images such as the Mona Lisa and the mirror suggest an inability to find an identity in the face of tragedy, an issue that Goldin seems to deal with all the more overtly as her work continued to develop. Whilst I was not able to find direct information about the context of this work online, the movement of Goldin of her home of New York to Mexico City suggests that there was an important reason for this photo to be taken that is perhaps is responsible for its distancing. This aspect is heightened by the obscuration of the Mona Lisa, a painting often associated with beauty and self-love, into complete darkness.
Goldin’s work, both in and outside of the Gagosian exhibition, was also notable for how she privileged the experiences of certain figures, who were her friends and even described as her tribe. One of the most notable figures in Goldin’s work was indisputably Cookie Mueller, a former actress in the films of John Waters turned writer, whose life as an openly bisexual woman before dying from AIDS just after her husband Vittorio Scarpati was central to Goldin’s work both before and after The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Although she was not as prominent at the Gagosian exhibition for what one might expect for probably Goldin’s most famous subject, I was very touched by the photo Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, New York City (1983). Unlike the previous two photos I analysed, I was intrigued by how this photo seemed to be both maximalist and minimalist, dotted with tons of images, yet also centring the distances between them in a photo that posited that Mueller was effectively the central orbit of the New York world, thus realising the entire exhibit’s oscillations between sincerity and tragedy.
After attending the exhibition, I watched Laura Poitras’ documentary about Goldin, All The Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), a few days later. Amongst many other marvellous details in this luminous documentary, I was struck by the affectionate way Goldin discussed Mueller and her other friends in the New York arts scene such as Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz. She often emphasised how all three of these figures killed by HIV were not defined by their deaths and instead by the lives they led and the decisive activism they promoted, a sentiment Poitras certainly echoed by focussing intensely on the success of Goldin’s protesting against the Sacklers through P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). The documentary also touched on how Goldin’s work, both artistic and activistic, can be traced back to the use of photography as a therapeutic tragedy in the wake of her sister’s suicide when she was only 12. The power of this tragedy as an emotional rupture in Goldin’s life is reinforced by her later photographic work Sisters, Saints, Sibyls that reasserts the Romantic nature of her work as oscillating between beauty and tragedy. The nature of this documentary as a series of tributes by Goldin to those whom she loved and who influenced her proved to me what I had already found so emotionally poignant in her work at the Gagosian, which is an ineffably sincere sense of humanity that both refuses to compartmentalise her experiences and also seeks to ensure that the audience feel accepted by the overall diversity of her catalogue.
In 2026, many people probably expect Goldin’s work, a time capsule of the AIDS epidemic in the 1970s and 1980s, to be less relevant and meaningful in the 21st century. However, it comes amidst a revival of interest in the New York arts scene due to one of 2025’s few perfect movies, Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day. Furthermore, amidst a rollback of rights for LGBT people in the USA and UK, it feels not just relevant, but essential that we all remember the beautiful diversity of humanity prevalent amongst the queer people in Goldin’s work. Therefore, I highly recommend that anyone in London must check out the Ballad of Sexual Dependency exhibit at The Gagosian.
English with Film Studies Undergraduate at King's College London.
