Nan Goldin

Goldin’s personal life is the raw material of her art, and this picture intimately evokes the pathos of her own passionate romance. The artist lies on a bed gazing at her lover, Brian, with a mixture of longing and resignation as he turns away from her. A soft yellow light bathes the scene, suggestive of the rays of a setting sun and a waning relationship.

Nan and Brian in Bed, New York City is included in Goldin’s influential work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a sequence of more than seven hundred color slides of Goldin’s friends and family, accompanied by a soundtrack. The forty-five-minute slideshow, which borrows its title from a song in The Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, presents an intimate, visceral portrait of a fringe community in downtown Manhattan in the 1980s. Goldin has described The Ballad as “the diary I let people read”; the informal snapshot style of her photographs lends their private dramas a powerful sense of immediacy. While the work captures the shared experience of a generation ravaged by drug excesses and AIDS, its central, driving theme is the intensity—the highs and the lows—of amorous relationships.