To Live, To Love, To Disappear: Goldin, Morrisroe, and Photography as Survival

There is a photograph in which everything seems on the verge of collapsing. Two bodies close together, a direct gaze, the dim light of an ordinary interior. There is no distance, no protection. Nan Goldin wasn’t merely observing that scene—she was part of it. The same is true of Mark Morrisroe, who, in his self-portraits, transformed his own existence into visual material—unfiltered, defenseless. In the 1980s, between New York and Boston, photography ceased to be a document and became a matter of survival.

Photographing from Within

Nan Goldin began building what would become “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” in the late 1970s. It is not a project in the traditional sense: it is a continuous stream of images that tell the story of her life and her community—friends, lovers, drag queens, artists, drug addicts. The photographs are projected in slide shows accompanied by music, updated over time, never truly finalized.

At its core, this is not about aesthetics, but about relationships. Goldin photographs from within, without the detachment that documentary photography has always considered necessary.

Mark Morrisroe follows the same line of thought, but with an even more fragile intensity. Raised in Boston, part of the so-called Boston School alongside Nan Goldin and David Armstrong, he creates a deeply autobiographical body of work consisting of Polaroids, manipulated negatives, and prints marked by manual intervention. His self-portraits are never simply self-portraits: they are performances, confessions, attempts to exist through images.

The AIDS Years, Without Distance

Context is crucial. The 1980s in the United States were marked by the explosion of the AIDS epidemic, which hit the queer and artistic communities of New York and Boston particularly hard. Many of those portrayed by Goldin would die within a few years. Morrisroe himself would die in 1989, at the age of thirty, due to HIV-related complications.

Viewed today, these images also serve as an archive of a decimated community. But to reduce them to that would be to limit them. They are not photographs of death; they are photographs of life as it unfolds, with an urgency born precisely from an awareness of its precariousness.

The Body as Language

What distinguishes these works from much of the photography of that era is the artist’s stance. There is no external observer. There is no neutral observation. Goldin has repeatedly stated that she uses the camera as a tool to maintain relationships, to avoid losing the people she loves. Morrisroe uses the image to construct a version of herself that can exist beyond her physical presence. In both cases, photography is not representation, but an extension of life.

Even the visual language is part of this break with convention. The images are often technically imperfect: out of focus, underexposed, grainy. Direct flash flattens the space, making the bodies almost tangible. There is no classical composition, nor any pursuit of the “beautiful image.” This aesthetic arises from necessity, not as a style.

Before Shared Intimacy

For a generation raised amid an overproduction of images, the work of Goldin and Morrisroe resonates in a unique way. Intimacy is everywhere today: shared, mediated, often performed. But precisely for that reason, it rarely carries any real risk.

In the 1980s, coming out meant so much more. It meant making visible identities and relationships that society tended to marginalize or erase. It meant, in some cases, exposing oneself to real consequences.

A language that still exists

Goldin and Morrisroe’s images do not seek to be viewed as testimonies to a bygone era, but as the origins of a language we now take for granted. The idea that private life can be public, that the body can be portrayed without filters, that vulnerability can be exposed—all of this has a clear lineage. It is no coincidence that their work continues to be cited, exhibited, and reproduced. Not out of nostalgia, but because it addresses a question that remains unanswered: what does it really mean to reveal oneself?

Goldin and Morrisroe weren’t building an archive. They were living. The images came later, almost as an inevitable consequence. And perhaps that is what makes them so difficult to reduce to a single style, even today: they weren’t created to be contemplated. They were created because, at that moment, there was no other way to endure.