1978 piece The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is what made Nan Golding famous worldwide. It is a piece of performance art, a slideshow of 687 frames accompanied by some thirty songs and a sort of photographic diary of the artist’s life in Boston, New York, and Berlin. Self-portraits, pictures of her lovers, friends, queer people going about their lives alternate to form a colossal opus of the human condition within a tribe. Ever since the beginning of her career, Nan Goldin had wanted to use photography as “an extension of my hand”, a tool to record the lives of a community she feels she belongs in, a community where excess, violence, emotional rollercoaster, illusion, and disillusionment are the norm. Goldin records every detail, like a seismograph. The way she does it – she lets images, in their uncompromising purity, speak, and never cared much for technicalities. When giving interviews, her whisper-like voice says wonderful sentences that sound like the existential summa of a life lived to the limit and of the wisdom that knows how to start all over again each time. It sounds like Nan Goldin speaks about ‘life aesthetics’ at a point where courage, passion, and artistic sensibility meet. It is no chance that this woman had the lucidity and the strength to campaign for public awareness of opioid abuse – which she suffered from herself – and to fight against the manufacturing of a specific opioid drug, OxyContin by Purdue Pharma.
GOLDEN LION VENEZIA 79
The protagonist of this documentary is photographer Nancy ‘Nan’ Goldin, famous for her explicit pictures and for the inseparability of her life and work. Her photo features influenced the work of countless photographers. She works especially w...
