Nan One Month After Being Battered

1980–1983

Films with Bette Gordon and Sara Driver

She acts alongside her friend, the Irish artist Vivienne Dick, in Bette Gordon's “Empty Suitcases” (1980) and, in “Variety” (1983), plays a character named Nan while photographing the production; those pictures were published in 2009. For Sara Driver she shoots stills for “You Are Not I” (1981), starring her lover and friend Suzanne Fletcher, and plays one of the accident victims herself.

1985

“Ballad” at the Whitney Biennial

The slideshow of “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” is screened at the Whitney Biennial; a year later it is published as a book.

1986

“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” appears as a book

Aperture publishes the “Ballad” as a book, with help from Marvin Heiferman, Mark Holborn and Goldin's friend Suzanne Fletcher: its 125 pictures are sequenced like the slideshow, with song titles. In her foreword she calls it a diary she lets people read, and the people in it her “tribe”.

1986

Her first book is dedicated to her sister

Goldin dedicates her first photobook, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, to her sister, who took her own life at eighteen.

1986–1998

Her pictures in other people's films

In “Working Girls” (1986) the photographs attributed to the heroine Molly are Goldin's; in Mary Harron's “I Shot Andy Warhol” (1996) she is credited with “special photography”. The photographs of the heroine of Lisa Cholodenko's “High Art” (1998) are based on her work.