Following graduation, Goldin moved to New York City. She began documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene, along with the city's vibrant, post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was drawn especially to the hard-drug subculture of the Bowery neighborhood; these photographs, taken between 1979 and 1986, form her slideshow "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency"—a title taken from a song in Bertolt Brecht's "Threepenny Opera." Later published as a book with help from Marvin Heiferman, Mark Holborn, and Suzanne Fletcher, these snapshot aesthetic images depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. In her foreword to the book she describes it as a "diary lets people read" of people she referred to as her "tribe". Part of "Ballad" was driven by the need to remember her extended family. Photography was a way for her to hold onto her friends, she hoped.