NAN GOLDIN | The Ballad of Sexual Dependency - First Edition

First edition and first printing of Nan Goldin's influential photobook. Very rare and collectible in fine condition. 

Blue cloth boards with gilt-lettered spine. Unclipped ($39.95) dust jacket. Original Aperture subscription envelope laid in.

This copy was found sealed in original publisher's shrink wrap and opened in order to confirm edition and condition.  The dust jacket has a few imperfections apparent upon close inspection: The dust jacket has a very minor wrinkle at top of spine and a handful of very minimal marks that impressed through the shrink wrap.  Otherwise as new, unused condition. 

Autobiographical photography of Goldin's intimate circle of friends and lovers in New York's Lower East Side of the late '70s and early '80s.   The saturated, energetic photos were first publicly displayed on the club circuit of New York City as a slideshow, and subsequently at the the 1985 Whitney Biennial. The slideshow was accompanied by music of the Velvet Underground, Nina Simone, and others, song titles reflected in the book's section titles.  Goldin groups and sequences photos to create narratives about sexuality, intimacy, family, gender, and reality.

Village Voice critic J. Hoberman called it "a near-definitive portrait of a particular Lower East Side bohemia" and named it one of the ten best films of 1985.

Roth calls it perhaps the most influential photography book since Diane Arbus' 1972 monograph. (Roth : Book of 101 Books pp. 252-253)

Martin Parr & Gerry Badger note that the book, "like most of the great photobooks, is an honest, troubling, passionate, deeply poetic mirror held up to our times," (Parr/Badger : The Photobook, A History Volume 2, p. 39.)

Goldin writes of The Ballad photos :

"I sometimes don't know how I feel about someone until I take his or her picture... I want the people in my pictures to stare back. I want to show exactly what my world looks like, without glamorization, without glorification."

“often fear that men and women are irrevocably strangers to each other, irreconcilably unsuited, almost as if they were from different planets. But there is an intense need for coupling in spite of it all. Even if relationships are destructive, people cling together.'

“Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavor of life.”