Article - March 30, 2026

The slideshow community, by Alice Leroy

On the occasion of the exhibition devoted to Nan Goldin at the Grand Palais until June 21, 2026, Alice Leroy, lecturer, researcher and film critic, offers a series of texts exploring her work through the lens of cinema. Between slideshows and installations, a form of writing emerges that engages with memory and desire. Here, she reflects onThe Ballad of Sexual Dependency and the slideshow as a collective form.

Nothing distinguishes memories from other moments: it's only later that they are recognized, by their scars.

Chris Marker La Jetée, 1963

In the 1960s, the slideshow replaced the family album as the medium for domestic communion. In the living room transformed into a dark room, the projector invoked the living and the dead before the gathered family. It holds the same place in Nan Goldin's chosen family, except that in this family, neither violence nor the troubling ambiguity of desire is kept silent.

Photographie de Nan Goldin — Brian and Nan in Kimono, 1983

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981-2022), the matrix and evolving work of Goldin's entire work, tells the story of this violence, the violence of desire, the violence of feelings, the violence of relationships. The couple is a political horizon as enviable as it is dangerous. Its tensions, between autonomy and dependence, duality and mirror play, gradually determined the structure of The Ballad.

This one borrows its definitive title from one of the songs in The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht, Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill. Its device, the slideshow, is not so far removed from epic theater, for the community of gazes is necessary to the community of images. Goldin sometimes says that her photographs are her "public diary", one she first shared with her chosen family before opening it up to strangers.

At one time, the people in the images and in the room were the same; one could hear the jokes of Cookie Mueller - an actress for John Waters as well as a writer, performer and friend whom Goldin photographed until her death in 1989. Now, the atmosphere is almost reverential. There is a vertigo inherent in the projection device, heightened by the syncopated rhythm of the slideshow, which does not unfold at the usual pace of film but as if in slow motion, breaking with the illusion of continuity to reveal the gaps between each image, halfway between photography and cinema. The screen is a mirror that wards off the passage of time; each viewer can project their own ghosts onto it, allowing themselves to be affected by these anonymous yet familiar faces.

Vue de l'exposition Nan Goldin, This will not end well, au Grand Palais — Vue de l'exposition *Nan Goldin, This will not end well*, au Grand Palais

Goldin began experimenting with the slideshow format intuitively, because she did not have access to a darkroom to develop her images. In 1979 at the Mudd Club - a hub of New York counterculture - where the incomparable satirical musician Frank Zappa was celebrating his birthday, she held the projector in her hand and loaded the slides one by one. It was in bars, concert halls and cinemas that she developed the form ofThe Ballad, in an indissoluble confusion between art and life.

This genesis inscribes her practice of the slideshow in a cinematographic writing, for Goldin does not seek the iconic image but the sequence. Her images only make sense with each other, in a montage that, for a long time, was replayed with each projection. These sequences bring us closer to these lives shaped by desire and pain; their intimacy is also our own. The Ballad is not just the archive of a family decimated by AIDS, nor the sedimented form of a performance that merges all the arts, it's also the film of our own history.