Mini Post

Romanda Abedair
Professor Cacoilo
Art & Women
January 24, 2017

Nan Goldin 

Nan Goldin was an influential photographer who took 700 portraits of her close friends and created her well-known project The Ballad of Sexual Dependency; which also included a soundtrack. This personal narrative is based on her experience around the world especially in New York, focusing on celebrating the combination of cultures and the different lifestyles, it also included the LGBT community. The Ballad also incorporates experiences that involved love, loss, and pain within drugs and sex. Her main issue focused more on domestic violence within her past relationship and the death of her close friends caused by AIDS.

Nan Goldin created this project as a resemblance of a diary to reveal the social and cultural issues that she experienced. She mentioned her friends that died from AIDS and wanted to announce the social issue in her work to inform people that the loss of someone is not easy and words cannot describe the pain. Her posts of portraits are shown through her projects.

She was abused by her boyfriend and had severe injuries around the face and wanted to reveal the mental and physical abuse that she went through. I think this is important and needs to be presented to the world because many women today are being abused by their partner and is manipulated thinking that being abused is not an issue. Goldin uses her art to speak about the negativity and unhappiness she experienced. The goal of the art piece is to end the cycle of violence within a relationship.

Nan Goldin’s “Nan One Month After Being Battered.” Credit2016 Nan Goldin, Museum of Modern Art, NY Times 

Goldin, Nan. Piotr with His Aids Medication. Digital image. Artnet. N.p., n.d. Web. 

Citations

Goldin, Nan. "Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency | MoMA." The Museum of Modern Art. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Jan. 2017.

Johnson, Ken. "Bleak Reality in Nan Goldin’s ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’." The New York Times. N.p., n.d. Web.