Songs Left Out of Nan Goldin's “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (2009)

I’ve always been seduced by the title of Nan Goldin’s slide show about her life and that of her friends from the mid-seventies through the mid-eighties, in and around Boston, Berlin, the Lower East Side. “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”—it comes from The Threepenny Opera, but I didn’t know that when I first encountered Goldin’s work: more than seven hundred color photographs, running in sequences, each image present for three or four seconds, replaced seamlessly by another, with songs from opera, Top 40, downtown New Wave dance clubs, and obscure blues records playing alongside, most often in excerpts of a minute or more—pictures, as they move through the 40 minutes or so of the piece, in which the primary image can seem to be that of a single person lying on a bed—or two people on a bed, neither acknowledging the other.