Nan Goldin rose to fame with her autobiographical visual diary The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which chronicled her life and friendships against the backdrop of an era informed by the AIDS epidemic of the 1970s and 80s. Named after a song from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s play The Threepenny Opera (1928), this deeply personal project comprises approximately 700 intimate portraits in slideshow format accompanied by music from the 1970s and 80s by the likes of the Velvet Underground and Dionne Warwick. Described by Goldin as ‘the diary I let people read,’ the images from The Ballad portray Goldin herself, her friends, fellow artists, performers, and drag queens – those whom she calls her ’family’ – in vivid color as they party, have sex, take drugs, and do everything in between.

With its implied intimacy and saturated coloration, ‘C. Z. and Max on the Beach, Truro, MA’ is emblematic of Nan Goldin’s early oeuvre. It was included in the influential 1986 book version of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. A print of this image was included in the 2016 exhibition of the same name at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. It was also featured in I’ll Be Your Mirror, the exhibition catalogue for Goldin’s 1996 mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.