A review by darlings
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency by Nan Goldin

5.0

I should preface this reviewlet with a little surgeon general's warning: I know jack about photography. Never taken a class in it, don't often buy books about it, have a very basic little digicam, and I've never really covered much photography in my art history classes either (I think I was comatose on the floor the day we went over it in Ms. Brittle's class or else absent on a "sick day".) That being said, I absolutely love Nan Goldin's work. She is one of the few photographers whose prints I would love having on my wall. She doesn't have many cheesy shots of decrepit trees or nymphettes wearing pearls and looking over their shoulders and shit; instead Goldin is a master at capturing relationships between people. In that respect, she reminds me a lot of David Hockney's portraiture. Goldin reveals moments of tenderness, sensuality, and brutality, often in the same image. She is famous for her images of couples from different walks of life, and rightly so: these are outstanding. Goldin was also one of the few photographers to cover the sad inception of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s from the ground; many of her closest friends fell victim to the virus. Goldin's photographs at this period are heartbreaking--somehow melancholic in their stoicism and extremely visceral. You feel like you're in the room with the people standing over their friend's hospital bed, and you can almost smell the sickness on his breath as he lays dying. These images are now decades old, but they convey an immediacy that I've seldom seen in such an emotionally heavy subject matter. I recommend Nan Goldin's work to anyone--whether you're interested in photography, or, like me, are an idiot about photography and are open to something new and inspiring.