Jim Goldberg

Coming and Going is Jim Goldberg’s unique work of autobiography. Since 1999, Goldberg has been photographing his daily life through all its vicissitudes and returning to his studio to re-imagine and investigate these images through a practice of collage, annotation, montage, and reconstruction for which he has become renowned. This book charts a course through the grief following the death of one’s parents, the life-altering birth of a child, the heartbreak of divorce, and the show more rediscovery of love. Told using a correspondingly tumultuous blend of singular and combined imagery, personal notes, collages, and ephemera, the book captures the bittersweet realities of an individual life while reflecting on the universal, inescapable comings and goings that shape us and the ways we grow to understand ourselves. Familiar from celebrated works such as Rich and Poor (1985), Raised by Wolves (1995) and Open See (2009), Goldberg’s visual language employs sequence and narrative with a feverish intensity. History, memory, and imagination collide in a vividly material practice to which the influences of fiction and film, and the book form itself, are central. Coming and Going offers a fierce, vulnerable, and at times overwhelming account of a life and a search for the elusive universals of experience – an achievement that constitutes Goldberg’s masterwork and a significant contribution to contemporary bookmaking. show less

Often considered Jim Goldberg’s seminal body of work, Raised By Wolves collages ten years of photographs, texts, films and installations into an epic narrative of the lives of runaway teenagers in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In Fingerprint, Goldberg exhibits many never-before-seen Polaroids from the project, which served as drafts for photographs he would later make, as well as gifts for the subjects themselves. The images are sometimes scrawled with show more text proclaiming the identities, challenges, and resilience of the teens, and other times capture a quiet reality of life on the street. Encased in a box set, the 45 loose leaf facsimile Polaroids create a freshly intimate and fragmented account of this classic body of work. show less

My only little tiff with this book is that there is very little cross-referencing done on the visual information in the photos and the extensive text. So you'll be reading about a location or a person and only half of the time will they be identifiable/identified in a photo.

Holy fucking shit.