It's now seeped into the fabric of the smartphone era, but for Nan Goldin, a gritty photographer living a gritty life in 1980s New York, photographing the people around her was a matter of life and death.

When a teacher first handed her a camera, she was 16 and going off the rails. But she quickly realised that photographing the people she loved - the pseudo family she was building up around her as her own was faltering - was a way of keeping them close, of cherishing them and making them feel loved.

Her extended photographic project of recording her "tribe" in New York - friends, lovers, hangers-on - began as a slide show, one that grew and morphed over the years, until she eventually distilled it into a series of 126 images, The ballad of sexual dependency, one of the defining artworks of the 1980s.

The National Gallery of Australia bought the last edition of the prints - Goldin only made 10, and this was the edition she had kept back for herself - from the artist in 2021 to mark the gallery's 40th anniversary, for US$562,000 - an amount that would well be higher if it had waited. The artist, now in her late 60s, is the subject of a recent Oscar-nominated documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, about her journey from artist to activist.

In 2017, she revealed she was recovering from an opioid addiction, and was focused on bringing down the infamous Sackler family for the lives they had already destroyed with their pharmaceuticals.

She was then, and had been since the 1980s, one of the world's most celebrated photographers, for both her intimate portraits of her own life, and her social justice activism.

But seeing her most famous series up close, at the gallery in Canberra on a wintry weekday morning, is like taking a crash course in New York cool. Goldin ran with drag queens and artists, actors and models. She pioneered the casual, snapshot-style spontaneity of the visual diary, but nothing about her images was ever accidental.

Curator of photography at the gallery Anne O'Hehir says The ballad of sexual dependency is as much about contemporary politics as Goldin's daily life.

"It's about the family, but it's also about postwar America - how you have to be and the conformity and the hypocrisy," she says.

"A lot of these kids get out of family homes, get to New York, and start living their authentic lives ... You sort of get that sense of just how cool it was.

"But there were a lot of drugs, and there's no way that Nan would want to glamorise that, she got herself clean just after this came out.

"She knows what legacy is, that everybody thinks that she's pushing that sort of lifestyle, but it's what happened to her, so she's determined to document everything."

For Goldin, picking up a camera mid-breakdown after a traumatic childhood was a salve. The youngest of four children, Goldin grew up in a middle-class, intellectual Jewish family, first in Washington DC, then Boston. Her beloved older sister, Barbara, eventually took her own life, unable to bear the repressive atmosphere at home. The parents ultimately chose to paint the death as an accident; for Goldin, is was as though her sister was being erased. Her life's work would then be dedicated to her memory, and for ensuring that her own life would never be erased.

"It comes from that really powerful place," says O'Hehir. "And it's clear, she says 'the camera saved my life'."

Goldin's work is often confronting; the series includes nudity, and sex. There's a famous image of herself with two black eyes, inflicted by her long-term lover Brian, who is seen throughout the series. Her subjects are often just hanging out, or getting ready to go out to the clubs and bars where they worked and played. Some have died by the end of the series; close friends would die of HIV/AIDS related illness, in a time when such people were vilified and, again, erased by society.

But there's joy and tenderness there, as well. She was no detached voyeur, like, say, Diane Arbus. She asked permission, and didn't display images if the subject disliked them.

"She wanted it to be a collaborative project," says O'Hehir.

"She says, she just wanted everybody, all her friends, who were sort of on the edge of society - if you were queer or something at the time, to see themselves as beautiful.

"It sounds a bit corny, but I think it's a really important part of the project, to bring this community together... into this empowered sort of space."

In doing so, says O'Hehir, Goldin forged a new confessional genre, a Pandora's box that was impossible to close again. Today, we take this kind of visual diary for granted. But when Goldin first started showing her work in New York galleries, it was sensational.

"She's got a very strong thesis for this that she talks about - in the beginning, it's about relationships, specifically, relationships between men and women," she says.

"Probably the image that's talked about as being at the very, very heart of the series is this image of Nan having been bashed up by Brian, that's a month after she got assaulted. So, the ballad of sexual dependency is about the fact that we want to be autonomous, [but] we also just have this addiction to relationships, because because we get real highs from it, it's what makes life worth living."

The series was created a good decade before the pop psychology classic Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus was published, but Goldin was already musing on how men and woman were "from different planets", and yet they were addicted to each other.

But they're addicted to their own as well. Just as the series is filled men and women coupling up, it's also about friendship, and one's chosen family.

"You see women by themselves, and then men by themselves, and then you get to this moment, it's interesting, this beautiful moment of women who've been affected by their relationship with men," says O'Hehir.

READ MORE:

"And then the next section, women together, looking after each other, consoling each other, finding, you know, survival through friendship?

And then you go into this amazing series of them getting married, and having kids. So it's a simple idea, maybe, but really powerful, at the time when the headlines in the papers were like, 'gays kill babies' and stuff, and you know, they were completely vilified."

Goldin would go into rehab for drug addiction in the 1980s; when she returned to New York, her friend, the achingly cool actress Cookie Mueller who had worked with John Waters, was dying of HIV-related illness, and another friend had also died.

"That's devastating to her ... It's interesting, but not in this work directly. You end up here, with empty beds and graveyards, but she's ... not polemical in that way. It's probably more effective to show these people living these lives - these people have children too, these people get married, there are parties, people are falling out of love, these people suffer, these people find great joy.

"They're much more than what they've been totally reduced to you at the time.

"It really drags you in."