“Trixie on the Ladder, NYC” (1979): Goldin “showed life as it was happening.” Photograph by Nan Goldin / Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Just as certain works of literature can radically alter our understanding of language and form, there are a select number of books that can transform our sense of what makes a photograph, and why. Between 1972 and 1992, the Aperture Foundation published three seminal photography books, all by women. “Diane Arbus” (1972), published a year after the photographer’s death, documented a world of hitherto unrecorded people—carnival figures and everyday folk—who lived, it seemed, somewhere between the natural world and the supernatural. Sally Mann’s “Immediate Family” (1992), a collection of carefully composed images of Mann’s three young children being children—wetting the bed, swimming, squinting through an eyelid swollen by a bug bite—came out when the controversy surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe’s “The Perfect Moment” exhibition was still fresh, and it reopened the question of what the limits should be when it comes to making art that can be considered emotionally pornographic.

Nestled between these two projects was Nan Goldin’s “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (1986). (An exhibition of the slide show and photographs from which the book was drawn opened this month, at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.) “The Ballad” was Goldin’s first book and remains her best known, a benchmark for photographers who believe, as she does, in the narrative of the self, the private and public exhibition we call “being.” In the hundred and twenty-seven images that make up the volume proper, we watch as relationships between men and women, men and men, women and women, and women and themselves play out in bedrooms, bars, pensiones, bordellos, automobiles, and beaches in Provincetown, Boston, New York, Berlin, and Mexico—the places where Goldin, who left home at fourteen, lived as she recorded her life and the lives of her friends. The images are not explorations of the world in black-and-white, like Arbus’s, or artfully composed shots, like Mann’s. What interests Goldin is the random gestures and colors of the universe of sex and dreams, longing and breakups—the electric reds and pinks, deep blacks and blues that are integral to “The Ballad” ’s operatic sweep. In a 1996 interview, Goldin said of snapshots, “People take them out of love, and they take them to remember—people, places, and times. They’re about creating a history by recording a history. And that’s exactly what my work is about.”

What also distinguishes Goldin from Arbus and Mann is her “I.” Although Arbus was brilliantly attuned to her subjects, she lived in a world that was very different from theirs. “I don’t mean I wish my children looked like that,” she said. “I don’t mean in my private life I want to kiss you.” Goldin lived with her subjects. And whereas Mann was related to her subjects by blood—which both intensified and beautifully hobbled her ability to stand apart from them—Goldin’s family was chosen. Which didn’t mean that it lacked drama: part of the pathos of her work is her awareness of how, even after we leave, we keep replicating the hopes and disappointments and fraught or absent love we knew at home with those other beings sometimes known as parents.

Goldin’s parents, Hyman and Lillian, grew up poor. They “were intellectual Jews, so they didn’t care about money,” she told me. “Most of all, my father cared about Harvard. He attended the university at a time when there was a kind of quota on Jews. It was a very small quota. Going to Harvard was the biggest thing in his life.” Hyman and Lillian met in Boston and married on September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland. Hyman went to work in the economics division of the Federal Communications Commission. Nancy was born, the youngest of four children, in 1953, and grew up, first, in the suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland, a quiet, orderly place, where, Goldin has said, the main goal was not to reveal too much or pry into the well-manicured lives of your neighbors. As a girl, she longed to know what was behind those closed doors. She also longed to escape that world of convention, she told me, in her high-ceilinged, top-floor apartment in a Brooklyn brownstone—which she moved into, in part, because it’s O.K. to smoke there, an eighties vice that she has carried into the new millennium. (Goldin also lives in Berlin; she left the U.S. in 2000, when George W. Bush was elected.)

It was a warm spring day, and the windows were partly open to let out the smoke and let in the tree-green air. While Goldin’s current décor is more upscale than the busted-looking furnishings you see in “The Ballad,” various pieces in her apartment evoke that world and its sometimes menacing playroom atmosphere. In a corner of the furniture-filled space sat a snarling stuffed coyote named Larry. On one wall, there was an early Arbus photograph of a fat lady in the circus cuddling a tiny dog, and, on another, a movie still of Renée Jeanne Falconetti emoting the exquisite anguish of Joan of Arc. The red-haired and red-lipsticked Goldin, in black slacks and a black shirt—the photographer’s customary uniform, because it allows one to recede into the background—alternately smoked and nibbled cheese or chocolate, or seemed to do both at once, as she talked about her childhood.

Her older brother Stephen, a psychiatrist who now lives in Sweden, was one of her first protectors, she said, but it was her older sister, Barbara, who claimed her emotional attention. Barbara confided in her and played music for her and had all the makings of an artist herself. “My father, who was not always great with my mother, was critical,” Goldin said. “There was a lot of bickering going on, and I wished they’d get divorced most of my childhood.” Her mother, she explained, was very possessive of her father, who was more interested in his sons. That left the vibrant, creative Barbara feeling lost and unrecognized, desperate for approval. (Goldin dedicated the book version of “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” as well as the catalogue for her 1996 Whitney Museum retrospective, “Nan Goldin: I’ll Be Your Mirror,” to Barbara.) Barbara acted out and could not be controlled—she was, according to Stephen, often violent at home, breaking windows and throwing knives—and her parents had her committed to mental hospitals, on and off, for six years. Goldin, in her 2005 book, “Soeurs, Saintes et Sibylles,” published in France, documents the institutions in which her sister was confined and quotes one hospital record that read, “The mother would like us to simply tell the patient that she is not well enough to be outside the hospital, when actually there is much evidence to suggest that Mrs. Goldin is too sick for Barbara to come out of the hospital.” Goldin told me, “Barbara said, ‘All I want to do is go home.’ She was fifteen. And my mother said, ‘If she comes home, I’m leaving.’ And my father just sat there with his head down. That is to me the most tragic scene in a person’s life.” Goldin, as a child, either sidestepped or cast off the parental approval that Barbara sought. That distance, she feels, saved her life. “The one good shrink I’ve had says I survived because, by the age of four, my friends were more important to me than my family,” she told me, shaking her red curls.