Youth culture, and by extension the social-realist impulse that so often attends it, has always carried an inherent nostalgia, anticipating its own disappearance even as it is lived. This is perhaps why it is so frequently mythologised across magazines, media, and film, from the raw diaristic violence of Harmony Korine’s early cinema, Kids, Gummo, later mutating into the neon nihilism of Spring Breakers, to a longer lineage of realist practices that privilege immersion over retrospection: the abrasive intimacy of Larry Clark’s teenage chronicles, the drifting, affective youth of early Gus Van Sant, or the tender precarity of childhood rendered by Sean Baker in The Florida Project. In many ways it marks a point of real emergence: identities are still in flux, attachments provisional and futures are still imagined. This tension sits at the core of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Nan Goldin’s genre-defying photobook made between 1973 and 1986, now re-presented almost forty years on as an exhibition at the Gagosian gallery in London, with all 126 photographs hanging on the walls.
Undone beds, drunken stupors, smeared lipstick, sweat-glossed bodies pressed together, retaining residues of what it feels like to be in love, to be drunk, to sit in the back of a car without knowing where it’s going, held together by the promise that something exciting will happen (finding out, only later, that it won’t). Holding onto the idea that anything is possible, even as the night spills into neon and a dizzy haze, and you wake up with a sore body that doesn’t remember how it got there. The initiations of adolescence, sinister and liminal, represent where we have all come from, and where we are still going. This, perhaps, is why we remain so drawn to their representation.
Nan Goldin is not alone in this fixation. Photography has long returned to the charged spaces of youth, intoxication, and becoming, from Larry Clark’s work, to Wolfgang Tillmans’s soft-focus intimacies of club culture and friendship, and Corinne Day’s raw, diaristic images of 1990s youth. Across these practices, nightlife emerges as a recurring condition through which belonging and self-fashioning are tested, functioning as an unofficial archive of a generation’s desires and fears. Each era can be traced through its nocturnal spaces, smoke-filled rooms, sweated bodies, or crowded rooms, and while the sites may change or relocate into new warehouses and venues, their emotional architecture remains remarkably consistent. These are spaces where intensity is condensed, where identities loosen, where attachments form quickly and dissolve just as fast.
There is comfort in recognising what is shared; each generation is convinced its anxieties are unprecedented, its crises or experiences of the world, unique. Yet the same impulses recur–– the need for proximity, the flirtation with self-destruction, the hunger for recognition, the desire to belong without becoming fixed. Art critic Stephen Westfall once described encountering The Ballad as “a kick to the stomach.” But maybe what lands so forcefully is not shock, but nostalgia. The sudden confrontation with our own teenage stupor, reflected back in Goldin’s way of veering from softening chaos, but implicating us in it.
Goldin has repeatedly resisted the label of detached documentarian. In this sense, the images, and by extension all images alike, are not composed about youth culture; they are produced through it. Perhaps this is the work’s enduring power: it offers an image of intimacy that is not aspirational, or instructive. It is messy, unresolved, deeply human, “lived-in”. Even when the images are saturated with melancholy or excess, they carry a residue of possibility. Youth, in this sense, is never over but continuously reactivated as a set of unresolved questions about who we might be, how to live, who to desire, and what it might mean to feel briefly, intensely alive.
The exhibition The Ballad of Sexual Dependency by Nan Goldin is on view through March 31st at Gagosian, 17–19 Davies Street, London.
Suzanne with Mona Lisa, Mexico City (1981) from “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1973–86. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Couple in bed, Chicago (1977) from “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1973–86. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Greer and Robert on the bed, New York City (1982) from “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1973–86. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, New York City (1983) from “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1973–86. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Mark in the red car, Lexington, Mass. (1979) from “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1973–86. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Bruce on top of French Chris, Fire Island, N.Y. (1979) from “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1973–86. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Dieter on the bed, Stockholm (1984) from “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1973–86. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Warren and Jerry fighting, London (1978) from “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1973–86. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Shelley on her sofa, New York City (1979) from “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1973–86. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Sandra in the mirror, New York City (1985) from “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1973–86. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Kiki and Scarpota, West Berlin (1984) from “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1973–86. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.