Nan Goldin

Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of all 126 photographs from Nan Goldin’s genre-defining photobook The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Opening January 13, 2026, at the Davies Street gallery, the presentation marks the first time the entire body of work will be shown in the United Kingdom. The exhibition coincides with the fortieth anniversary of the volume, which Goldin described at the time as “the diary I let people read.”

Created between 1973 and 1986, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is an incisive reflection on gender, intimacy, and power, widely regarded as Goldin’s magnum opus. Forty years after its publication, the photographs not only define the era of downtown New York in which they were made but have also influenced decades of visual culture and artists around the world. Goldin notes: “I don’t select people in order to photograph them; I photograph directly from my life. These pictures come out of relationships, not observation. They are an invitation to my world, but now they have become a record of the generation that was lost. To show The Ballad in its entirety forty years after I published the book is to reaffirm that desire for transformation and the difficulty of connection and coupling are still true to our world. I’m still impressed that generation after generation finds their own stories in The Ballad, keeping it alive.”

Shot in the vibrancy of real life and everyday spaces, Goldin’s formally and chromatically radical approach upended the status quo and helped to move photography from the margins into the center of contemporary art discourse. The Ballad was Goldin’s manifesto and opening salvo in a decades-long career that asserted a new potential for the photographic image.