A LOST WORLD
MoMA has mounted a 40th anniversary exhibit of photographer Nan Goldin’s 1986 book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, that captured her bohemian Lower East Side community with anthropological clarity, and also love. The framed shots, about 8″x10″, seem loosely composed, like snapshots, but carry a stunning physical and emotional immediacy. The most famous one, a self-portrait, shows Goldin in full makeup, a month after she’s been beaten so severely by a boyfriend that she can barely open her eyes. Thirty years afterwards, in a culture numbed by internet porn, reality TV and Tinder, these images do not shock. Instead they stir up nostalgia for a time in New York City, the early 1980′s, when rents were cheap, downtown was different from uptown, and young people moved to the city to become artists and writers rather than venture capitalists and fashion bloggers. New York City served as a vital refuge those who didn’t have the freedom to act out their lives in other places.
Today, the most powerful photographs in The Ballad are those that pull back from the faces and figures to show that world itself: kitchens with battered white metal appliances, bedrooms with bare walls and windows, hotel rooms with flocked wallpaper and mismatched lamps, basement bars with neon lighting and sticky floors. The handful of still lifes on display are surprisingly moving. They capture a mood by giving a glimpse of the corner of a room, a
tabletop arrangement, or the wall of an apartment hallway. The manner in
which people decorate their homes reveals their values bitingly, innocently, and eloquently. For Goldin’s friends expressiveness, color, corrosiveness and humor matter far more than order.
Goldin’s most unique gift is, surely, her ability to capture the heightened emotional drama between two people – that moment that promises a vital connection or tearing apart. But when she pulls her gaze back further, to reveal these people within their habitat, her photos are even more powerful. One shows two young men sitting behind a small round table at a bar, a cluster of half-empty cocktail glasses obscuring their faces. The view is gently out-of-plumb and softly cropped, so that the entire world seems to be slowly tipping, unable to right itself. These men might be falling for one another or having a lover’s quarrel. And this might be precisely what it felt like to be a young person, in New York City, in the early 1980′s.
Nan Goldin. The Parents’ Wedding Photo, Swampscott, Mass, 1985. © 2016 Nan Goldin.