Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A photobook classic, and perhaps the work for which New York photographer Nan Goldin remains best known, "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency" is a visual diary chronicling the struggle for intimacy and understanding between friends and lovers collectively described by Goldin as her "tribe." Her work describes a late 1970s/early 1980s New York now long gone, and a world that is visceral and seething with life. As Goldin writes: "Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavor of life."

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Booklist Review

Goldin's ``diary I let people read'' exists in two other media as well: a live multimedia show and a videotaped 700-image slide series with a soundtrack. The book offers about 130 color photos, most of snapshot immediacy and coloristic distortion, of herself, her friends, her family, and a few other persons she may not know. Her subject, she says in a brief introduction, is coupling, although many of the pictures show not couples but single men and women usually in informal, implicatively vulnerable postures: a woman crying, a man sleeping, a woman looking at herself in a mirror, a man masturbating. Such images of singleness imply or don't a longing for coupling. The pictures are grouped into clutches of three to six by titles and lines from pop songs, e.g., ``Wild Women Don't Get the Blues'' and ``The Bed's Too Big without You.'' Another product of New York's East Village art scene, this collection is as gritty as punk rock, as trashily flashy as graffiti. RO. 779 86-070154