In COMING AND GOING (Mack Books, paperback, $85), the Connecticut-born photographer Jim Goldberg pieces together the chapters of his life in a million glances. In 1985, Goldberg published “Rich and Poor,” capturing in words and images both sides of the economic divide in pre-internet San Francisco. A decade later he released “Raised by Wolves,” which documented runaway teenagers across California, again alongside their own handwritten commentary.
Here Goldberg turns the lens onto himself, showing us fragments of his own life from 1980 on in collages of photos overlaid with other ephemera: a typed letter he wrote to his dad, locks of hair, his daughter’s toothbrushes, unidentified photo cutouts and his own contact sheets.
Together these form a deeply personal visual memoir: the orange tree his dad planted in Florida in 1980; and that same tree years later, now just a broken stump standing behind his older parents in a photo framed by so many others of the couple throughout their life together. Goldberg shows us his own marriage too: a Polaroid of a young woman in a black bathing suit on which he’s written, “THIS IS THE MOMENT I FELL IN LOVE”; the birth of his daughter; her first days at school. We watch the generations age over the course of the book; we see the heartbreak of his divorce and the grief over his mother’s cancer diagnosis and death. In the images he’s amassed over a lifetime, Goldberg shows the beauty and sorrow of everyday existence.
