For almost forty years, American photographer Jim Goldberg has been documenting the lives of others. Below his home in San Francisco, among homeless young people in the Mission district (Raised by Wolves1995), or very far from California, with migrants arriving in Europe (Open See2009), Jim Goldberg looks at the left behind, the forgotten, the marginalized.
Over the years, he has developed a particular technique, mixing photography, collage and a form of literature: on his images, Jim Goldberg often asks his subjects to write a few words to tell their story, or simply add a thought. So much for the most famous part of his work.
But, since his youth, Jim Goldberg has also regularly immortalized his own life: his parents’ house and the setting of his childhood in Connecticut, the love that arrives, the birth of his daughter, his father’s cancer… It was during a residency in 1999 that he first began to organize his personal archives into a book.
“ I had piles of photos, collages, pieces of paper that I had kept, and I wanted to make sense of what I had in front of me.” he says. He speaks of ” ephemera”, this poetic English term which designates all documents intended to be thrown away, but which have become collector’s items: concert or cinema tickets, posters, reminders left by a loved one in a kitchen…
Visual autobiography
At the beginning of the 2000s, Jim Goldberg was going through a divorce, he had to organize his new life as a single father and take care of his daughter. He also joined the Magnum agency in 2002. In short, “ life took over”, he summarizes. However, in the years that followed, he continued to collect traces of his existence and that of those close to him: the used toothbrushes of his daughter, Ruby, a lock of his and his hair each time they were used. cut: “My daughter’s and my partner’s daughter’s hair changes color over time, they grow or change style. The passage of time is clearer in mine, which tends towards gray, he said. Everything is marked by an acute awareness of the passing of time and an overwhelming nostalgia.
Now 70 years old, he finally publishes Coming and Going, a visual autobiography. “I applied the same method to this project as for all the others. In a sense, it is easy to look at other cultures, other existences and to be fascinated, to notice their particularities, to talk about them… The difficulty was to use the same critical method to return to my own life. » Mixing times and places, the intimate and the professional, Coming and Going questions memory and history. The photographs overlap, seem to comment on each other.
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