Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is an intensely unique record, established out of the designer’s personal occurrence throughout Boston, New York, Berlin, and elsewhere in the late 1970s, 1980s, and beyond.

Name behind a song in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, Goldin’s Ballad is itself an essence of central opera; its lead—including the mural artist herself—are apprehend in romantic experience of intimacy and depletion. They incident rapture and suffering through sexual intercourse and drug use; they celebrate at dance nightclubs and link with their kids at home; and they ache from household cruelty and the devastate of AIDS.

Nan Goldin’s work signs the viewer up for a wild drug-induced ride through the 1980s. Heroin and love were the drugs of choice. Depicted in the exhibit’s main room was a selection of raw scenes of lust to loneliness. Goldin’s excellent manipulation of light allowed for sharp textures throughout each image, creating mini environments visitors could theoretically walk into. In Rise and Monty Kissing, you could feel the moment of walking through a crowded party, scanning the room, and spotting this scene laid out in front of you. Every image has this feeling of genuineness rooted in its raw lighting and composition. Many of the images were self-portraits of Nan, solo or including various lovers. With these scenes, viewers can gain a sense of connection with Nan through the episodes from her life she chooses to exhibit. We feel her pain and empathize with her story.

The other half of the MoMA exhibit included a 46-minute slideshow with partnering soundtrack. After sitting through a couple songs, its simple to see the strong relationship with the songs in the soundtrack and the images they presented. Each song’s lyrics and general tone transferred into that of their paired images. Long, emotion-filled rock songs with lyrics about sex, drugs and rock and roll paired with images of various partially absent individuals using heroin needles. Songs about female empowerment paired with images of early drag queens. With this interesting form of presentation, Goldin further allows viewers into her thoughts by providing them with a clue about her feelings on different aspects of her life through the songs chosen in this well formulated soundtrack.

In all, Goldin is inspiring in her ability to allow her audience into her head. She provides an experience that leaves viewers with a powerful insight into her story.

Nan Goldin, an American photographer, known for her stylish works. Goldin ran away from home when she was only 14. She lived with a group of young people who struggled with their lives and self-imposed exile in the United States. To record her own life, Goldin started to shoot real and messy lives of her close friends. As she said, “I photograph directly from my life. Those pictures come out of relationships, not observation” (MOMA). Therefore, those photographs were collected together and presented in slide form called “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.”

I visited her exhibition on Tuesday at MOMA. The first thought came to my mind was shock. All of her work featured LGBT-related themes, violence, illness, depression, and drugs.  As growing in a traditional family, I was resistant to those themes of nude and dark humanity. However, I started to observe something different among photographs while I was watching the slides of Godin’s work. This 45-minute slide show is set to a soundtrack. Different periods of figures were shown with different music. They lived in crazy and self-imposed exile society and tried to prove themselves to the public. In Goldin’s camera, those young people struggled with their own lives no matter what role of characters they played in that society. In this slide, Goldin used her camera to portray her friends’ experiences about childhood memory, fell in love with others, sexual abuse, relationship, marriage, fight, pregnant, children and until they died. Goldin astonished me not only she showed her and her friends’ real lives, but also she’s good at using light and create a better view of some dark and bad environment.

One photograph impressed me a lot is Goldin’s portrait. This portrait is named as “Nan one month after being battered.” Normally, photographers don’t put themselves into their cameras. In this photo, we can easily see that Goldin had a very bad experience at that time. Her bruise still did not go away after she got her boyfriend’s abuse one month later. As Goldin said, the reason she kept this photo was that she wanted to remind herself to not suffer again. From here, we can see Goldin’s photographs are showing her own privacy to the public by using this way of recording life. After finishing watching this slide show, I felt like I just peeped someone’s private diary. No matter how messy or dark the environment was, Goldin could always create some conditions to make the figures look better in her camera. Such as yellowish orange light, all the shadows on the figures, and strong sense of line and so on. Goldin is really good at taking a candid photograph because we can feel the figure’s emotions when we look at those photos.  To be a real life photographer, Goldin did it perfectly.