What it would have been to have stood in the OP Screening Room of Rafik’s, in a loft on 13th and Broadway, or the Mudd Club down in Tribeca, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when downtown was an altogether different world and when Nan Goldin first set up her slide projectors to screen her major work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. To see the slideshow now—either in its entirety, usually around 700 images, clocking in around 40 minutes, in a gallery or museum setting, or represented by the book of the same name, whose 30th anniversary is being celebrated today—is, in some ways, to have to imagine the feeling that must have existed in those rooms. Ballad is made of pictures, but its truest form lies somewhere in between still photography, cinema, and live performance. “Each showing was different,” Goldin remembers. “I’d be holding the projectors in my hands and the bulb would burn out and I’d run home to get another. And the audience would wait.”
Things were probably a little raucous, probably also a little reverent in those rooms, as soundtracks spliced from Maria Callas, the Velvet Underground, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, James Brown, and Yoko Ono played to a deeply personal visual diary of Goldin’s life, the late nights, the mornings after, the romance and sex and drugs and violence. The first audiences mirrored the characters in the photographs, her closest friends and chosen family—downtown artists and actors and filmmakers: Cookie Mueller and girlfriend Sharon Niesp, David Armstrong, Suzanne Fletcher, among them, all calling out which pictures of themselves they liked best. The photos were made largely in the years before Goldin went into detox. It was also the height of the AIDS crisis; many of the subjects of the photographs died young. “The book had become for me a volume of loss, a ballad of love,” Goldin writes in its afterword. Her color slides go straight into their bedrooms and before their bathroom mirrors, to the bars, to the street. As the title suggests, Ballad feels musical in form, too, a narrative made up of distinct movements, heightening the division between men and women, which resonate in drastically different evocations of the same experiences, intimate and spontaneous. There are separate sections of women getting ready to go out, of men getting ready to go out, of women alone, of men alone, of women bruised and beaten, of men bruised and beaten, of women with guns, of men with guns, of women and men in and out of love, living and dying.
At the heart of the story is the photographer, who points the camera at herself from the same unflinching vantage: “The photo of me battered is the central image of the Ballad,” she writes. Goldin had been badly beaten by a lover, abuse that necessitated major surgery. That photograph is the hinge of the slideshow, of the book; it is also a visual echo of the loss of her sister, who killed herself when she was 18 and Goldin was 11. Shortly after, Goldin was seduced by an older man, and it’s that tension between pain, loss, and desire that propels her work. Terrified she too would die young, Goldin left home before the age of 15; eventually she moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she became close to the drag queen scene; and to Boston, where she studied with photographer Henry Horenstein, who turned her on to the work of Larry Clark; and to New York City, where the Ballad would take real shape. Now she lives between New York and Europe.
Since those early days, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency has been shown all over the world, the book reissued in multiple printings. This year it was on view again at the Whitney, in the inaugural exhibit at the museum’s new downtown home. Tonight at Terminal 5, it will be screened with live performances by Laurie Anderson and Martha Wainwright and other musicians, at Aperture Foundation’s celebration of the 30th anniversary of the publication of the book. Last week, when I called Goldin in New York, we talked about the evolution and constant re-editing of Ballad, the bar where she was working when she made it into the Whitney Biennial, and the relationship between photographs and memory in her work. I found her to be as open and honest as her pictures.
I’ve seen Ballad in a museum setting, I’ve seen it as a video, but I’ve never seen you, in a room, screening the slideshow. And in that sense none of us will have the complete experience of some of the early slideshows. So I’d like to talk a bit about all the different forms it’s taken over the years and also how the slideshow itself has evolved.
You say it can’t be seen in its early versions, which is interesting. But I actually found some recording tapes recently, though I haven’t watched or listened to them. I made them on reel-to-reel tapes for years—the soundtracks. I have different versions of them. I tried different lengths of time. Sometimes it was an hour and a half, sometimes it was 20 minutes; until 1986 I had the drag queens in the middle, between the men and the women. And then a man named François Hébel wanted to show it in Arles, France, and he said, “What do you think about moving that section?” He was scared to ask—it is a bold thing to ask an artist to change their work—and I had quite a temper at that time. But I did it. And it was a really smart move on his part.
One of the things that’s so compelling about this work is that you’re making it from within. This is the world that you were part of, and yet you were able to go outside enough in the way that an artist has to go outside to some extent, enough to be able to fully see. You were outside-inside. And those early shows, the ones I wish I could have seen, were often seen by the subjects themselves.
Yes, the only people in those early audiences were people in the pictures. They were shown at a downtown space run by an amazing man named Rafik who is no longer with us. I think it’s a place to buy film equipment now. But at the time there was a screening room and I would show it regularly there. I’d be holding the projectors in my hands and the bulb would burn out and I’d run home and get another bulb. And the audience would wait. The slideshows were all really handmade.
I was just remembering the early black-and-white slides that were in the middle of the show then. They didn’t really have a way to make black-and-white slides at the time, so they were very high contrast, really scratchy; they were very primitive and very personal. People would say, “Oh, I like that one of me.” In a way that was what it was made for, so that people could tell me how they felt about it. They became part of it. I edited it for my friends. And sometimes friends who were living with me in the mid-’80s would help me edit it. Vivienne Dick, a Super 8 filmmaker, was a huge influence on my use of music.
I read somewhere that one of the reasons you turned to slides is that it was cheaper, that you didn’t have money for paper and darkroom supplies.
No, that’s not true. I started it when I was at art school in the ’70s in Boston. I went to Provincetown and then I decided to spend a winter there. Basically I learned how to drink at art school; teachers at the school collected old cars and we’d sit in the cars and drink. But I learned how to print color. And I’m still friends with people I went to school with there. That was really art school.
I went to Provincetown and lived there through the winter. The way the school worked is that you would show your work three times a year and the teachers would grade it, or they’d give you advice or they’d tell you were making shit. I had no access to a darkroom there, so that’s when I started showing slides to the teachers. And a friend of mine would help me make the music. When I screened the slides at the famous “Times Square” exhibition in 1980, a boyfriend of mine was the DJ. So that was the very beginning of the slideshow. At first it was really just a series of pictures.
You start taking pictures, and then you start taking more and more, and then they accumulate, and then eventually you start to shape the whole thing. I’m curious about the moment you recognized that this was becoming a body of work, and about how you arrived at this particular form?
All I made were individual prints until 1978 except the ones I showed for credit. At my school, every year you’d hang your work in this huge armory in Boston as an installation, and if you won a prize you’d get money to travel. At that point I started making color prints and showing them on the wall, and I got the travel money and I went to London. There’s a series a museum wants to buy—it’s lots of skinheads that I was hanging out with then. The two months in London were some of the wildest times in my life. Literally. And I documented the whole thing. But I was always inside the work. It was never strangers. Even the skinheads. It wasn’t like I went out looking for skinheads. I stayed with them briefly until they became the soldiers for the National Front. I witnessed that. In that period I lived a really wild life. Much wilder than anybody knows.
It’s a visual diary as you’ve described, but was that part of the initial impulse to photograph, “this wild time, this is going to disappear one day and photographing is my way of holding on to it”?
I talk about this a lot in the intro to the Ballad and it’s true. It was not about the wild times. I never thought they would end. I was living in the moment, not documenting for the future. I think having an early death in my life, of my sister, made it more important to hold on to people. I’m aware even now that when I’m getting ready to leave a place, I photograph much more.
At the same time you wrote that a photograph—
That I thought it could save the person somehow. That I thought I could keep people alive. I really believed it until recently. I would light candles in churches, too. I still do that. And I also thought I could preserve the memory of the person through a photograph. But without the voice, without the body, without the smell, without the laugh, it doesn’t do much. Well, it keeps a memory, but then it becomes a memory of the picture at some point. It’s important to understand when I took the pictures I was not thinking of their later use of preserving memory because I was in the moment—I didn’t know what would be lost!
You know Sally Mann in her memoir earlier this year said essentially the same thing—how photographs destroy actual memory. She was talking specifically about her friend, the painter Cy Twombly. She said the reason she remembers him so well is that she has so few pictures of him.
Yes, I just did a text for my new book, Diving for Pearls—which is only out in German now, it will be out in English very soon—and I write about the difference between pearl diving and cultured pearls and I make an analogy between analog photography and digital photography. The pictures I took that came out all black, sometimes I remember those moments more strongly than I remember the ones that I photographed. It happened during some of the most important moments of my life, when the film came out black. I went to New Orleans for three weeks once with Cookie and Sharon and they were lovers at the time and they were breaking up. That was an incredibly wild three weeks and I photographed constantly. And I got 30 rolls of black film back. Except in the middle of one of the rolls there’s a picture of Cookie looking in the mirror and putting on lipstick, and written next to her on the wall it says “Angel.” It’s the only picture that came out of these 30 rolls. And the camera worked perfectly before I went and it worked perfectly when I got back. It had to be voodoo.
That’s so haunted.
And so my last statement in the book is, “Will voodoo ever work on digital photography?” The reason I call it Diving for Pearls is that David [Armstrong] used to say getting a good picture is like diving for pearls. You take a thousand pictures to get a good one, like oysters with the rare pearl. It’s true, and I used to say I’m not a good photographer. If anyone took as many pictures as I do, they’d be standing up here, too. It’s a lot to do with generosity, just taking thousands and thousands of pictures, and then where the art comes in is the editing.
I think of them as distinct narrative forms: the individual pictures; the book; the slideshow, which is somewhere in between still and cinema. There’s that word, ballad. It’s a musical form in one sense, it’s a literary form, and especially when you talk about photographs making their own memories, well, you’re reshaping these memories all the time into new stories. Where does, say, the book fit in for you, in relation to the slideshow?
It’s a book of a film, and that’s what it started as. Now it has its own life, and I love it. I want to make films; that’s my life’s dream. I haven’t made that step yet, but I’m about to. I’ve found a collaborator and now I have to find a screenwriter. But that’s all I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid and that’s why I’ve never particularly cared about photography. That’s why photography is easy for me to do. It’s not as important to me to make great pictures as it is to make a great film, which has stopped me all these years. So this is my form of making movies. And Jim Jarmusch told me in the early ’80s that he saw the slideshow as being a little bit like Chris Marker’s film La Jetée, which is also made of stills. It’s not really, because each slide is shown at the same time and it’s not repeated. I mean, I would love to make something like La Jetée, but it’s a lot more complex in the way that it uses the still.
Who inspired you when you were a kid, when you first had the impulse to make films?
I went to a hippie free school and we didn’t have any classes. I mean, we once had a class in Italian—once, in four years; we once had a class in American expatriates in Paris, and once a class called “Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny.” We had school meetings every week, and that’s where I learned to talk, which was very important for me. Because I was practically silent; I was so shy in those years. And then David and I went to the movies three times a week. So at 15 I’d seen all of Antonioni, Jack Smith, Warhol, Morrissey, Bertolucci, Bergman, John Waters (of course), Fellini, and all the American superstar women—all the Bette Davis, all the Joan Crawford, all the Jean Harlow, all the Greta Garbo. So that was my education—cinema, from the ages of 15 to 18. And it still is. I wrote an article for Cahiers du Cinéma, they asked me to write about my favorite films. And I said that films taught me how to live. They taught me what relationships were. I learned everything I know from films.
Jack Smith was at some of your early slideshows too, wasn’t he?
Yes, he and I did a screening together at Rafik’s for Thanksgiving once. Things were very different back then. Artists hung out, we were all hanging out and very supportive of one another. And I remember the time the first person we knew went with a gallery and it was shocking to us. When I moved to New York in ’78, I started with a gallery, Castelli Graphics, because Marvin Heiferman, who is a genius about many things but especially about photography—Marvin became my dealer for all of the ’80s. In ’85 he invited all these curators to Rafik to come see my slideshow, and that’s how it got into the Whitney Biennial.
And what else were you doing at the time, apart from the world of the pictures?
I was working as a bartender, at Tin Pan Alley, this tough bar on Times Square—back when it was Times Square, not Disney World—for this amazing woman who politicized me. This was Maggie Smith. I worked at the bar first, and then Kiki Smith worked there, and Ulli Rimkus, who later opened Max Fish, and Cara Perlman and other female artists. There were a lot of street people, a lot of prostitutes and pimps and gang kids. Some of them really didn’t like what happened to the bar. It was a neighborhood bar. Maggie cooked. It was on 49th Street and there was nowhere to eat. So people from CBS Records and all these places started coming because it was the only place with good food. And it was in this Japanese tourist guide, so suddenly a lot of Japanese tourists would come in, and the Clash would come in, and the bar changed and the regulars didn’t really like it, having all these arty women working there.
Well, the regulars never like a change.
No, they don’t. And there was a guy who’d come in and drink something like 30 Heinekens and pass out every day. I was doing the stills for a film. I used to do stills for downtown filmmakers like Bette Gordon and my work was at the Whitney, but I was still tending bar. One day I went back to the bar and that guy had gotten up and gone behind the bar and opened the wooden case where my cameras were stored and pissed on my cameras. And I screamed like an opera diva—you could hear me all over Manhattan—and I quit. That was my way out.
That’s incredible.
It was. That bar really toughened me up. You know it was a lot of street prostitutes and their tricks, it was a lot of johns. Mostly they didn’t even turn tricks, they would rob them and the johns would come into the bar just screaming. And the pimps always drank Hennessy and the prostitutes drank Long Island iced tea; they wanted to get as drunk as possible on one drink. That was a very tough life people were living, sex workers and all that. At a certain point I wanted out of the bar. I still dream about it. I still dream I have to get there at a certain time.
How long did you work there?
Five years. And in the first few years after my shift I would go to an after-hours bar and work there and it was a lot of bad cocaine, and when it closed at 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning, we’d go to breakfast and everyone would be reading the racing forms. That went on for years, and then I started working the day shift at the bar, and that’s when I met the guy Brian who’s in the pictures.
That world is resonant in the pictures of Ballad, of course, but you just described another dimension of it so vividly. I’m curious, as time went on, what influenced some of the other changes you made in the sequencing of the slideshow. There are such distinct movements—the men, the women, the babies, the abuse, the sex, the moments of dark and light, of love and loss—that emerge throughout, and like you say, the editing of that narrative is so key.
Maggie really politicized me. She is the one who helped me see the work is about gender politics. And I had talked to people in Provincetown about that in the ’70s. After she became involved, I started making it more and more obviously political, to speak to her. Sometimes it was really hateful toward men and sometimes it was really positive, depending how I was feeling. Each showing was different. I made slideshows specifically for people, too. I’d put in a lot of pictures specifically of that person and dedicate it to them. It could be anyone, a friend or a lover. In ’83 I started traveling in Europe and showing it. I showed it many more times in Europe than in America. I showed it in European museums as one-off shows as early as 1983, and in underground cinemas and clubs all over Europe. It was accepted there earlier than it was in the U.S. One of the people who later became a lover of mine in Berlin, he raised his hand and said, “I’d like to be in the slideshow.” And he was, afterward!
Well, that’s a pretty great come-on line. And given all those versions, given its ever-evolving status, what is your relationship to Ballad now?
I thought I’d stopped re-editing it by 1992; the last soundtrack was from 1987. But I re-edited it when the MoMA bought it in 2008, and they wanted it to be the same, they wanted it to be really dark—no pictures with light. Peter Galassi and his two assistants came down to watch as we were putting it together, and every picture that had light in it, he’d go, “No.” But we put all those pictures in and they didn’t notice, or they loved them anyway. We made one copy in 2008 for MoMA and one for a friend who’s one of my biggest collectors in the world. We made that one much tougher, because he’d been a big part of the ’70s and ’80s at the Mudd Club, so we made it much more about that period. And this year I sold one to the Tate Modern and could not stop myself from editing a few categories in the analog version.
That’s what I keep coming back around to: the uniqueness of each slideshow, the uniqueness of what happened in the room each time you showed it, how it was all affected by where it was being shown and who was there, and what was going on all around, what it felt like. All the things I wish I could go back in time and experience—in that sense I suppose I really think of it as a performance.
That’s true. But then it became like Amy Winehouse. I felt such a strong connection with her because, you know, at the end I showed up at some fancy place in Chicago and I was too drugged to finish the slideshow, and there was a huge audience, and I know exactly how she felt when she showed up wherever it was and she couldn’t perform. I mean, I had an audience of 500 and she had an audience of probably 50,000, but it was the same feeling. And it happened to me twice. It’s really painful. I loved that movie.
I haven’t seen it yet. I want to. I recently lost a friend who had dealt with some similar things, and I’ll watch the film at some point, but I can’t yet. But there was a slideshow for this friend's wake, with music playing, pictures from these very wild, free, happier, beautiful times.
Oh, that’s good, it’s good they showed those.
I couldn’t help but think of Ballad then, how it’s a record of loss, but of desire and love and light.
Right. It can’t only be the dark moments. There’s a lot of light there, too.
This interview has been condensed and edited.