Gagosian London presents Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, exhibiting all 126 photographs in its UK debut and marking the photobook’s 40th anniversary. Goldin’s unfiltered chronicle of lovers, nightlife, and private moments retains a startling immediacy, a public diary that still feels insistently present.
Created between 1973 and 1986, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency documents a specific social world through photographs, slideshows, film, video, and books. The images, dense with emotion, nightlife, and reflection, retain a raw force that has not dulled with time.
The work centers on Goldin’s immediate circle in downtown New York, tracing desire, tension, intimacy, and power within close relationships. Private sexual encounters and moments of vulnerability surface alongside an undercurrent of unease. One subject, Brian, later violently assaulted a partner, underscoring the real consequences embedded in the work’s emotional terrain.
Goldin has described The Ballad as a diary, recorded with her constant Nikon. At Gagosian London, 126 framed prints span three walls, producing a cumulative intensity that echoes the original 800-image slideshow. The installation pulls viewers through overlapping narratives rather than isolated images.
Across the series, trauma and tenderness coexist. Bruises, pregnancies, dancing, sex, solitude, and spectacle appear side by side, collapsing distinctions between private life and public persona. From the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to skeletal figures traced in graffiti, the work maps the full range of Goldin’s social universe.
Shot spontaneously in the 1970s and 80s, the photographs reject polish in favor of emotional density and formal boldness. Their saturated color and directness helped reposition photography within contemporary art. First presented as a slideshow in New York and published by Aperture in 1986, the book remains influential, now in its twenty-third printing.
Goldin’s moving-image retrospective This Will Not End Well is on view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, until February 15, 2026, before traveling 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 through April 12, 2026.
