The erotic single cover designed by Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin’s photography, from its beginnings in the early 1970s, has been dedicated to recording and immortalising the reality that surrounded her, through her distinct lens.
Goldin first picked up a camera at 15, attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and living in the city’s downtown with drag queens, who became her chosen family, and she began photographing them.
“I lived with them; it was my whole focus,” she explained to BOMB magazine in 1991, “Everything I did, that’s who I was all the time. And that’s who I wanted to be”.
After graduation, Goldin moved to New York in the late 1970s. Her photographic storytelling was shown in slideshows of the facets of New York culture she immersed herself within and around: subcultures among the LGBTQ+ community, as well as the post-punk and new wave music scenes. Her first slideshow in New York came from Frank Zappa’s birthday party, hosted at The Mudd Club, where her boyfriend was DJing.
Cutting her teeth, she found herself ceaselessly documenting the world around, eventually curating what became The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, first exhibited in 1985 and photographed between 1979 and 1986 (when its book was published). Initially, the project was only intended for the eyes of Goldin’s close friends, as it portrayed them with a candid lens: they were photographed partying, having sex, taking various drugs, and the like. The result was over 700 images lauded for their confessional point of view, exposing the sometimes-darker sides of subcultures that had not been seen by the average person before.
Indeed, as Goldin described to The Guardian in 2010, modern culture’s approach to photography in a digital world is dominated by Instagram. “Most of that stuff is so easy and lacking in any kind of emotional depth or context,” she noted, “Nowadays, people forget how radical my work was when it first appeared. Nobody else was doing what I did.”
Goldin’s work and legacy, in the decades since she first began sharing her work in the early 1970s, persists not just in the general cultural consciousness, but in a number of mediums: various exhibitions, shows and publications, fashion collections, a recent documentary film and in her activism, vocalising her support for Palestinian liberation and a ceasefire in Gaza, and being a founding member of the advocacy group Pain (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), against the opioid epidemic.
One curious immortalising of her work came from the music world, on the cover of a rare single. One photograph of Goldin’s, an intimate capture of an unknown couple, appears on the cover of Ici sur terre, a 2000 single from the French electronic group Sous le manteau.
The group is composed of three members of Grand Tourism, a ‘French Touch’ house/downtempo group, Chris Canavaggio, Bob Farrel and Sean Henry, along with vocalist ‘Zambla’, otherwise known as Christophe Galud. The project started as something of a joke when Galud arrived at the group’s studio one night and, under the influence, began rambling nonsensically into a microphone. They began setting Christophe’s words to music, producing their first single, ‘Derrière les rochers’, in the summer of 1999.
The version of Ici sur terre with its infamous cover was an extremely limited 12” vinyl release, with just 300 copies produced. It is now considered a rare collector’s item, one of which Antoine de Beaupré, a curator, author and founder of Libraire 213, told i-D in 2018 that he happens to own.
“I think it’s been censored, actually, because of the cover,” he noted, “The funny thing is that I know the girl on the cover very well. She has a copy, and I can’t even remember how I got this copy. It came into my collection by accident.”
Produced by Gambler Records in France, the image that adorns Ici sur terre’s is as overt in its sexuality as it is vague in context: de Beaupré explained that the photograph is from “during a period when [Goldin] was very dark in her work”, producing a film that featured the couple in a similar lens. Goldin was indeed no stranger to photographing sex with as much honesty as she did in her photographs of drug use.
From when The Ballad of Sexual Dependency debuted, and however ‘provocative’ her photographs have been perceived over time, Goldin’s work remains nestled in sincerity.
