The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the struggle for intimacy and understanding between friends, family, and lovers ― collectively described by Goldin as her “tribe.”

Her work describes a world that is visceral, charged, and seething with life. First published in 1986, this reissue recognizes the persistent relevance and freshness of Nan Goldin’s cutting-edge photography. Her lush colour photography and candid style demand that the viewer go beyond the surface to encounter a profound intensity. As Goldin writes: “Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the colour, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavour of life.”

Through an accurate and detailed record of her life, Ballad reveals Goldin’s personal odyssey as well as a more universal understanding of the different languages men and women speak, and the struggle between autonomy and dependency. Over the past twenty-five years, the influence of Ballad on photography and other aesthetic realms has continually grown, making the work a contemporary classic. Nan Goldin’s story of urban life on the fringe was the swan song of an era that reached its peak in the early eighties. Yet it has captured an important element of humanity that is transcendent: a need to connect.

This new edition of Ballad has been printed using new scans and separations created by master-separator Robert Hennessey from Goldin’s original transparencies, rendering them with unparalleled sumptuousness and impact.

This is an expanded and updated version of Nan Goldin’s seminal book The Other Side, originally published in 1993. There will be a revised introduction by Goldin, and for the first time the voices of those whose stories are represented. Now being released at a time when the discourse around gender and sexual orientation is evolving, The Other Side traces some of the history that informs this new visibility.

The first photographs in the book are from the 1970s, when Goldin lived in Boston with a group of drag queens and documented their glamour and vulnerability. In the early eighties, Goldin chronicled the lives of transgender friends in New York when AIDS began to decimate her community. In the nineties, she recorded the explosion of drag as a social phenomenon in New York, Berlin, Bangkok and the Philippines, photographing their public personas while showing their real lives backstage. Goldin’s newest photographs are intimate portraits, imbued with tenderness, of some of her most beloved friends. The Other Side is her homage to the queens she’s loved, many of whom she’s lost, over the last four decades.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the struggle for intimacy and understanding between friends and lovers collectively described by Nan Goldin as her "tribe." Her work describes a world that is visceral and seething with life. As Goldin writes: "Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the colour, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavour of life."