NAN GOLDIN Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing
New York: Aperture, 1986.

Nan Goldin has taken her own life and community as the subject for her work. The works that make up The Ballad of Sexual Dependency first explored the lives of Goldin and her friends living on the Lower East Side during the late-1970s and early 1980s. These intimate portraits of lovers and friends and of the poverty, drug use, sex, and violence of the times are carefully crafted explorations of photographic color. Returning from drug rehabilitation in 1989 Goldin said she had gone through "a kind of amnesia, a profound loss of identity." Goldin returned to New York hoping to reconnect to old friends and to rebuild her life. What she found, however, was that "many of those I most admired were sick or had been killed by AIDS." When Artists Space asked her to curate a show, Goldin decided to bring together works that would reconstruct her lost community--works by those who were gone, works by those living with AIDS. The outcome was Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing.