Nan Goldin: Song of Sexual Dependency review – a thrilling display of sex, smoke and sullen silence | Photography

nSet more than 40 years ago, Nan Goldin’s Song of Sexual Dependency records a world lost, but one that seems as present as it did when I first saw these images. A collection of photographs taken by the artist between 1973 and 1986, the story has been presented as an ever-changing slide show, with numerous accompanying soundtracks and voiceovers, since the 1980s.

It has also been presented in video form as a film and book. I’ve been familiar with these images for most of my life, watching Robin smoking, with Kenny in the background in the purple room. Smoke still hangs below the mirror ball and Robin’s appearance is still stunning. I saw Susan crying, and in another shot, looking at her face in the mirror in the tiled bathroom and feeling dizzy by the oblique reflections.

I’ve seen these outings and beach days and the road in the hot light and the man sitting on the edge of the bed lost in his thoughts. Goldine watches him as she presses the camera shutter (you can’t see this, but you know it’s happening). The camera was mounted on a tripod on the far side of the room, and Nan and Brian were filming themselves having sex, just as she had taken pictures of her other friends doing the same. There’s some sullen, sullen feeling in the air that you can’t recognize. A year later, Brian ended up beating her badly, as he became overcome with jealousy after reading her diary.

Goldin called the story a memoir that allows people to read it. Her Nikon camera was always close at hand, so much so that people forgot about it (except when they didn’t). In this exhibition, Golden displays them as 126 framed photographic prints, stacked four high and covering three black walls. They fill the space. The slide show originally presented up to 800 images over 45 minutes in a darkroom, accompanied by a changing soundtrack that often included Maria Callas, Petula Clark, Dionne Warwick and Dean Martin. Goldin believes that a slide show is a film made using still shots.

Here you get lost among the prints in a different way. Its effect is cumulative and electrifying. There is no slack in these full arrays, which keep the eye moving between images, moving between captured moments and emotions. We go back and forth in time, catching glimpses of the artist’s parents, an old Mexican couple who seem happy enough but are a week away from their second divorce. Skinheads loitering in a room with creepy wallpaper; Bobby masturbating. Muscular men, sad young men and a man dressed as Napoleon on New Year’s Eve; There was a guy named French Chris lying on the hood of the convertible, his shirt wide open, like a beautiful corpse.

Among the flashbacks, we encounter an empty bed in a New York brothel, wedding photographs, and a collage of photographs showing Goldin’s black eye, her bruised face, the scar of an ectopic pregnancy, and a heart-shaped bruise. We move from these to tender intimate relationships, people dancing or having sex and getting lost in the moment, lonely people and people coupling and uncoupling. Their titles are exciting and succinct, and the pictures always make you wonder: “What’s the story?” This, in part, is What still makes the story so compelling and rewarding. Every photo amazes me and leaves you on edge.

These are images of innocence and experience. We begin with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who are as macabre in the Coney Island wax museum as they undoubtedly were in life, and end with a pair of screwed-up skeletons in the doorway, curled up in a tender embrace on the walls. These first and last images depict people moving in and out of Golden’s orbit, sharing family, parties, holidays, tenderness, sex, silence, and games of Monopoly.

What amazes me now is not how dirty and stressful life used to be for Golden and her adopted family of friends, but how normal their lives seem now. They don’t seem lost or marginalized at all. We’re now used to people posting photos and videos on smartphones as a kind of calculated mirage of their lives that is constantly updated and often very self-conscious and calculated. In the 1970s and 1980s, Goldin had a camera, and he took pictures quickly. At first, she presented her slide shows in nightclubs and bars. Her audience was her peers.

Goldin’s camera sees more than the photographer sees. The apparent casualness of her approach is deceptive. The emotional texture and atmosphere of her photographs prove that not everyone who can hold a phone can take pictures worth seeing. When she was dancing, when she was having sex, whenever and wherever, Golden was in her house.