Jim Goldberg describes his new photobook, Coming and Going, as “my attempt to get close to the reality of the experience of living”. A self-styled “documentary storyteller”, born in New Haven, Connecticut, Goldberg made his name with a series of acclaimed projects, including Raised By Wolves (1995) and Open See (2009), that spoke of his deep engagement with other people’s troubled lives. This time, though, the subject is himself.
“I’m making something universal out of a normal life.” he says, “It’s all in there: deaths, births, divorce, illness, all the stuff that happens along the way. It’s my story, but all our stories, too.”
Jim Goldberg’s daughter Ruby as a newborn.
Though it comprises a mere fraction of the archive of everyday images Goldberg has amassed in his working life, Coming and Going is, at first glance, almost overwhelming in its visual overload. It unfolds in a tumultuous flow of photographs, Super 8 stills, scrawled texts and ephemera that moves between the everyday and the painfully intimate. Many images have been written over, others cropped, cut up or assembled into elaborate collages. It takes a while for the rhythms and undercurrents of this unruly individual life to reveal themselves.
“There is so much going on in the book, because I collect so many images and then sift through them all to find meaning,” he says of his singular creative process. “Although I have a real love for the power of photography, I also have a sense of deep insecurity that a picture can say it all. I feel I have to add to it in order to somehow grow the work – to make it become better art, essentially.”
Throughout the book, his late parents, Herb and Lil Goldberg, loom large. His father died in 1993, aged 76, his mother seven years later, aged 79. Given that he has delved so deep and unsparingly into his own experience of love and loss, was it a more painful undertaking than his other books? “Well, it’s taken over 23 years to complete, because life kept getting in the way.” he says, laughing wryly. “But, yes, it was very tough, particularly revisiting my parents’ deaths.” He tells me that, at one point, during the printing of the book, he had to “turn away” when a photograph of his mother appeared. “I was thrown back there for a moment, but it’s important to say that the process of remembering through the photographs also brought me great joy. At times, it was like my parents were back with me and all was well.”
Elsewhere, Coming and Going brims with energy and life as it tracks the joy of first love, marriage, the birth of his daughter, Ruby, her coming of age, and his current relationship, with his fellow Magnum photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti. They live together with Ruby and Sanguinetti’s daughter, Cat, on a farm in Sonoma County, California.
Goldberg is a master of juxtaposition, both formal and emotional, the results often jolting as well as revealing. A pair of Polaroids capturing Ruby’s first steps gives way abruptly to a series of visceral, unsettling shots of his ailing father, oxygen tubes in his nostrils, being fed, examined and comforted as the end draws near. Mortality is a constant undercurrent. “What is different now is that I’m 70,” says Goldberg, “and death is more present in my own life, so there’s been a shift towards a perhaps more reflective approach. With grief comes grace, so they say, but I still have a streak of the punk spirit that I had as a young kid who found a way to intuitively express himself through photography.”
Goldberg studied theology for a time before picking up a camera. Coming and Going also chronicles his audacious creative journey, in which he rejected the tradition of detached reportage for an altogether more immersive approach. Threaded through the book are glimpses of the projects he has made along the way, including his best known work, Raised By Wolves, which has attained classic status for its immersive, almost novelistic portrait of a group of young and wayward homeless people surviving on the streets of San Francisco. Ten years in the making, it saw Goldberg befriend many of his subjects, including the two central characters, Tweeky Dave and Echo. “Some of the kids from Raised By Wolves are 50 years old now,” he says, as if he can’t quite believe it, “We are still in touch. They are part of my life.”
In a scrawled note in the book, some of their subsequent journeys are glimpsed: “Antoine was in San Quentin for 10 years and OD’d the day he got out…Meghan now works as a programmer at Apple… Macki stated her own bike repair shop… Many proudly send me photographs of their kids or grandkids, but most people I have to assume never left the streets or didn’t make it.”
In one bittersweet assemblage, Goldberg includes a recent handwritten note from Echo in which she tells him that she now has “four wonderful kids, a bunch of cats and a boyfriend I like most of the time”. It also reveals that she is waiting for a kidney transplant and is too sick to work. Her teenage partner in crime, Tweeky Dave, died in 1993, of liver failure. “His ashes,” writes Goldberg, “live on a shelf in my home, next to my mum and dad’s.”
Jim Goldberg’s mother, Lil.
Coming and Going is, on many levels, a continuation of Goldberg’s documentary storytelling approach, in its weaving of images, words and impressions. Here, though, as he puts it “I am the witness and the subject.” That the book took so long to make says much about the particular challenges of such self-scrutiny. “The boundaries were suddenly not as clear,” he says, “To be honest, it wasn’t easy to do this book and it’s hard to say why I continued. Maybe it was more to do with dedication than anything else. Or the self-reflection that comes with getting older. For me, photographs are a way to stop time, but, at some point, they also become a way to take notice and become mindful of what you have experienced as a human being.”
