“I’m not responsible for anything like social media, am I? Tell me I’m not.”

The photographer Nan Goldin wanted to make it clear that her signature work from the 1980s — “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” — was not to blame for our current age of compulsive image sharing.

“It can’t be true,” she said. “But if it is, I feel terrible.”

The connection is almost too easy to make: The “Ballad” is a confessional and revealing autobiography in pictures. Set to an eclectic mix of music, through a 40-minute slide show we follow her and her friends for about a decade in a movable bohemian feast. They primp and bathe; party and dance; have sex and marry; raise children and inject heroin. Some of them die.

The images are lacerating and intimate — grippingly human. Ms. Goldin has described the “Ballad” as “the diary I let people read.” One of its best-known images is a 1984 self-portrait she took after being beaten by a boyfriend.