Nan Goldin: A Ballad of Fragility
I had found myself a bicycle in Paris. Nothing glamorous; a little old, a little tired. But I went everywhere on it. From the saddle I looked not at shop windows but at faces, at windows, at the glimmers of life I caught for an instant. The rush of fashion week, appointments, small meetings, stops at bookshops… I made it to all of them on that bicycle. Rather than taking the metro or a taxi, cutting through the side streets and gliding over the bridges felt more real to me. On the climbs my breath quickened; crossing the bridges, a strange fragility rose in me. Paris stopped being a city I watched through glass and became something alive, with its wind, its sound, its smell. I loved Paris most in those moments. Because in those moments, the city was not just a backdrop; it became a feeling.
One evening, cycling around, I come across Nan Goldin’s “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” in a bookshop. First I see the cover — that yellow light, that fragile yet resilient air inside the room — and it touches my heart like a small tremor. Without a second thought, I buy the book and head back to the hostel where I am staying.
The hostel is carpeted from end to end; even footsteps are muffled, as if everything were lived in a whisper. A room and a small bathroom… A cramped place where students, travellers and people drifting between getting lost and being found come to stay. Suitcases wait by the door, pillows hold the warmth left from someone else’s sleep. The air coming in through the window belongs less to Paris than to the journey itself. And I, in that small room, sit on the edge of the bed and open the pages. Paris slowly recedes, and Goldin’s world takes its place. It is as if the people in the photographs have pulled up a chair for me and said, “sit down and listen”. That evening, in the midst of my solitude, I feel I have come a little closer both to others and to myself.
The last days of 2025… This time, as the Istanbul cold makes itself gently felt, I take my seat in the small, quiet auditorium of the Pera Museum. The title on my ticket: “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”.
The lights slowly dim. Before me is not a huge cinema screen, but an intimate one that makes me feel as if I were sitting in someone’s home, looking through old photographs. As part of the “All That Art” programme marking the Pera Museum’s 20th anniversary, Nan Goldin’s world opens up — quietly, gently. As if the pages of the book that fell into my hands in Paris years ago were being read again, this time in Istanbul, through light.
Laura Poitras’s documentary, winner of the Golden Lion in Venice, bears witness not only to Nan Goldin’s life but to the way she sees the world. Goldin’s fragile yet courageous photographs, which for years have recorded queer communities, friendships and her own life, are interwoven with her fight against the Sackler family, among the principal actors in the opioid crisis. The film stays close to an artist’s world while tracing a great wound of our time.
In Goldin’s world, beauty seeps not from perfection but from the broken places. People in the photographs are not posed or performing. Faces with smudged make-up, the silence after a fight, nights stretching into morning… And over all of it, a light tone of tenderness. Because Goldin uses the camera not like a judge but like a friend. She does not shy away from closeness, from touch, from emotion. She is not a photographer framing life from a distance, but someone breathing inside that life.
Looking at Goldin’s photographs, you also see how love and dependency become entangled. Relationships are at once trust and suffocation, need and the wish for distance. The warmth of solidarity between women sits beside the presence of men hardened by rivalry.
For Goldin, photography is not merely a record — it is the rebuilding of memory. In these photographs there is the voice of someone who lost her sister as a child. A hand hurrying to hold on to what would otherwise be forgotten. A resistance against leaving memory to other people’s narratives. A search circling the question “Who was she really?” Perhaps that is why the people in her photographs do not step onto a stage; they simply exist.
Goldin does not romanticise life. But she does not miss the poetry within it either. She moves along the fine line between the destructive power of love and the resilient side of being human. And perhaps the most striking thing is that all this fragility contains a romantic courage:
To be seen as you are.
Without a mask.
Without commentary.
Without hiding yourself.
For me, Nan Goldin is less a photographer than a “witness” trying to accept life in its naked state. She seems to take photographs not to make the world more beautiful, but to be able to love the world as it is.
And I, in that small room in Paris, wandering through the pages, had felt this:
Some lives are lived less like an album than like a diary.
Goldin’s world is exactly that — with pain, with love, with dependency, with desire and with all its vulnerability. And perhaps this is precisely where beauty begins.
“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” reminded me not of how complex and fragile human relationships can be — but that this fragility is in fact a kind of strength. In Goldin’s world, love is messy and exhausting, but real. And perhaps that is why, every time I pick up the book, I do not merely look at photographs; I pass through a life. Sometimes I want to be like the people in Nan Goldin’s frames. To stay as I am… Without too much polish, without correcting, without explaining. Riding my bicycle, I try not to hide the fragility within me. Letting go, if only a little, of the effort to look strong, I blend into the city in my vulnerable state. In those moments I resemble myself more; I feel closer not to the eyes of others, but to my own existence.