Family Subcultures

Nan Goldin

Is her work a deeply personal insight into relationships or just glorification of drug use and violence?

Her series, ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, used 700-800 images, displayed as a slide show with music, to show an evolving narrative of sex, drugs and abuse.  She has been heavily criticised by the media over this work for merely making heroin use and domestic abuse fashionable and glamorous. My opinion of the work is that she has used the camera as an extension of herself rather than as a piece of equipment. The camera experiences the intimate relationships between herself and her subjects, and as such it is merely a truthful reflection of her experiences. In my opinion, the images do not glorify drug use and domestic violence, they only document it.

Peres, Michael. 2007., Concise Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, The: From the First Photo on Paper to the Digital Revolution. [online]. Elsevier Science & Technology. Available from:<http://lib.myilibrary.com?ID=178986> 23 April 2012