"A visual diary chronicling the struggle for intimacy and understanding between friends, family, and lovers -- collectively described by Goldin as her "tribe." Her work describes a world that is visceral, charged, and seething with life. First published in 1986, this reissue recognizes the persistent relevance and freshness of Nan Goldin's cutting-edge photography. Her lush color photography and candid style demand that the viewer go beyond the surface to encounter a profound intensity. As Goldin writes: "Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavor of life." Through an accurate and detailed record of her life, Ballad reveals Goldin's personal odyssey as well as a more universal understanding of the different languages men and women speak, and the struggle between autonomy and dependency. Over the past twenty-five years, the influence of Ballad on photography and other aesthetic realms has continually grown, making the work a contemporary classic. Nan Goldin's story of urban life on the fringe was the swan song of an era that reached its peak in the early eighties. Yet it has captured an important element of humanity that is transcendent: a need to connect"-Publisher.

Ever since the early 1970's Goldin has lived with and among drag queens, documenting both their glamour and their struggles. The Other Side is her very personal declaration of love and gratitude to these drag queens, who showed her a way out of the captivity of pre-packaged, socially prescribed identity.

This is a chronicle of Nan Goldin - a New York-based photographer - and her friend David Armstrong's friends, loves, and lives over 20 years. The book is both a visual dialogue between two artists and the portrait of a generation whose hopes and aspirations have been scarred by drugs, AIDS and sexual harassment. The parallel paths of their lives are represented in this book in the juxtaposition of styles - Goldin's colour photography set against Armstrong's more austere black-and-white imagery. It is both an illustrated history of recent culture and an artistic experiment.

From the publisher: "In 1994 Goldin and Araki decided to collaborate on a project about adolescents in Tokyo. They set out to capture the joys, thrills, and anxieties of youth. The two photographers, each of them in their very own way obsessed by love and eroticism, complemented one another perfectly. Together, they forged a panoramic vision of love and sexuality in all its varieties. Nobuyoshi Araki took pictures of young girls in his studio capturing both their budding awareness of the female body and its seductiveness and, on the other hand, their insecurity and anxiety. His portraits precisely pinpoint the frightening and exhilarating transition from girl to woman. Nan Goldin explored Tokyo's queer underground-gay boys, transvestites, fetishists, and all those who defy society's preordained definitions of sexuality. She celebrates their courage and beauty, their fight for their right to love.

The interrelation of art and photography is brought to new heights of complexity as Nan Goldin's photographs of boy prostitutes in Southeast Asia accompany Klaus Kertess's story about the failure of love.