The Goldin age: Stunning ’80s exhibition that anticipated the selfie opens in Perth

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One of the most remarkable photographic exhibitions ever to travel to Perth has just opened at the John Curtin Gallery.

Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a selection of images distilled from the slideshow that caused a sensation when they were first shown in the underground clubs and bars in New York in the mid-1980s.

Nan and Brian in bed, NYC 1983, by Nan Goldin

When Goldin moved from Boston to the Bowery in 1978, photography tended to either dispassionately record the life of the streets (a tradition of photo-journalism that stretched from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Robert Frank) or were more in painterly tradition of studio-based portraitists such as Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and soon-to-flourish Annie Leibovitz.

Goldin, in striking contrast, used her camera like a diarist, capturing her family or “her tribe” — the post-punk, queer subculture that gathered in the cheap, rundown neighbourhood of the Lower East Side that would soon be decimated by HIV/AIDS.

“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the diary I let people read,” wrote Goldin in the introduction of the book of the 1986 book that features many of the 126 photographs included in the exhibition, which has come to Perth courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia.

“The camera is as much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex.”

Would many of the students on the campus of Curtin University, where the John Curtin Gallery is located, fully grasp the shock of Goldin’s work?

Such intimate imagery is now all-pervasive in the age of the selfie. Their hands are not quite cameras, but their smartphones are rarely out of their hands.

“When Goldin started working there was a clear division between the photographer and their subject,” says Australian Portrait Gallery Photographic Curator Anne O’Hehir, who travelled to Perth for the opening of the John Curtin show.

“To be considered a serious artist you needed to have objectivity. You had to maintain distance from your subject. Goldin broke through that barrier.”

“Goldin also made no attempt to glamorise her subjects.

Nan Goldin, ‘Mark tattooing Mark, Boston’ (1978).

“Look at the shot of Suzanne crying. She does not make her pose attractively or bathe her in beautiful light. Goldin shoots her with a basic 35mm camera with a flash, giving it a harshness. She was going beyond artifice to record the reality of the moment.”

While there were precedents to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency work, such as Larry Clark’s 1971 autobiographical work Tulsa, O’Hehir believes Clark’s documenting of teen life in Oklahoma does not go as far as Goldin, who was living and loving with her tribe.

“Whenever you bring a camera into a situation things change. But because Goldin was with these people all the time they let down their barriers,” O’Hehir says.

“You can’t pose forever. She would shoot people making love or in bathrooms or on the toilet, which is not something you would have seen in photographs during that era.”

While Goldin’s work is celebrated for its immediacy and avoidance of artifice, the breathtaking Cibachrome prints owned by the National Portrait Gallery reveal her to be a much more considered artist for which she is given credit.

They are eye-poppingly saturated, artfully framed and arranged or, more accurately, edited to the story of the life and times of Goldin and her friends, which she says were more important than her real family and, indeed, her photography.

“Goldin’s work is famous for its casualness. They are called snapshots, which links them to family photos that we all have in our albums,” O’Hehir says.

“But she has an astonishing grasp of visual language and is an incredible image-maker. She studied the history of painting, she had a deep understanding of cinema, which is a major influence on her work.

“To see these images in this form is a revelation. They shimmer. Even if you think you know the work through books or on the screen you will get a shock.”

O’Hehir says the key set of pictures within the collection centre on the violence Goldin suffered at the hand of her boyfriend Brian, who went for her eyes and burned her diaries.

While Goldin’s place in the history of photography is secure, she is today most well-known for her activism, a transformation documented in Laura Poitras’s 2022 Oscar-nominated documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.

In the film, fiery former heroin addict Goldin goes to war against the company at the heart of the opioid crisis, Perdue Pharma, that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Goldin had become addicted to Perdue Pharma’s signature product OxyContin after an injury to her wrist in 2014. She said it took her some time to become addicted to heroin; with Oxy Contin she was hooked after just 48 hours and popping 15 pills a day, describing it as ”scarily addictive”.

Goldin hit the headlines again in November when she gave a speech at the opening of her show in Berlin in which attacked Germans for conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

“If an artist in my position is allowed to express their political stance without being cancelled, I hope I will be paving the way for other artists to speak out without being censored,” said Goldin, whose speech triggered pro-Palestinian chants in the gallery and was condemned by German politicans.

While activism has moved into the centre of the life of the 71-year-old photographer, Goldin previously said that politics was very much evident in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

“When I first began I wasn’t making political art. Politics was my art,” said Goldin in a lecture at the Lincoln Center, going on to remind the audience that the work was first shown in clubs and bars with a soundtrack before being displayed in galleries and museums.

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is on at John Curtin Gallery on the campus of Curtin University until September 14. Entry is free. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is streaming on SBS On Demand.