Nan Goldin, Nan on Brian’s Lap, Nan’s Birthday, New York City, 1981, silver dye bleach print, printed 2008, 15 1/2 x 23 1/8″ (39.3 x 58.7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2016 Nan Goldin.

The iconic self-portrait of the artist – and its gut-wrenching title, Nan, one month after being battered – is considered by critics, and by the artist herself, one of Goldin’s pivotal works. Taken in 1984, the image defined a turning point in the artist’s life and work as a photographer and marked the end of her long-term relationship with then-boyfriend Brian. It is still a deeply troubling image, as compelling as it is contentious; it is no wonder that it has defined Goldin’s archive. In the publication of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Goldin writes of the events that preceded it: “For a number of years I was deeply involved with a man. We were well suited emotionally and the relationship became very interdependent. Jealousy was used to inspire passion. His concept of relationships was rooted in … romantic idealism … I craved the dependency, the adoration, the satisfaction, the security, but sometimes I felt claustrophobic. We were addicted to the amount of love the relationship supplied ... Things between us started to break down, but neither of us could make the break. The desire was constantly reinspired at the same time that the dissatisfaction became undeniable. Our sexual obsession remained one of the hooks. One night, he battered me severely, almost blinding me.”

Yet the image is far from a straightforward condemnation of a violent lover. Goldin did not name her abuser until much later and she did not include any of the images of Brian when The Ballad was originally released. She stated at the time that this was because she intended for the deeply personal image to have universal function – to show that every couple has the potential to combust into fits of passion or rage. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency takes its name from a song in Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera – in which Mrs Peacham sings about the inexorable sexual power women have over men. Goldin’s operatic photo album is an attempt, as the artist puts it, to figure out “what makes coupling so difficult,” something Goldin searches for in addiction and obsession, love and sex, drugs and violence – wherever the struggle between independence and dependence is present.

The image is also included in the current iteration of Goldin’s slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency – on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, until February 12, 2017. While it still provides an emotional underpinning to the work, the photograph also highlights Goldin’s obsessive need to control ways of seeing. When she began showing her portraits in New York in the 1970s, cash was tight and the artist used the slideshow format rather than make expensive prints – but over the years she has added to it and altered it. The soundtracks she developed, meanwhile, evolved naturally from showing her work at bars and nightclubs, where her friends would often suggest music and share in her process of editing. Now the songs are in a symbiotic exchange with Goldin’s visual sequence. The narrative is as rhythmic as it is emotional – a symbiotic exchange that mimics Goldin’s conceptual ideas on the nature of dependency and the flickering, fading heartbeat of life on the edge.