On the centreline of a photograph by Jim Goldberg, two lookalike kittens sidle up so close together they could be a Rorschach test; this is most definitely the kind of cosy scene one hopes would drift up readily from the subconscious. There is an on-your-deathbed normality and overabundance in the prints and pages by Goldberg: huh, so that’s what life was about.
‘The way that I look at the world is not just through a singular viewpoint,’ Goldberg says, ‘it’s almost like I’m seeing a montage’. Renowned for his playful approach to documentary photography, including collage and annotation (often by his subjects), his new book Coming and Going sees Goldberg pointing the camera inward, on himself and his family, from the 1980s to the present day. ‘There's discomfort in moments, to be intimate and vulnerable. But I think that's a necessary thing as an artist – to be open to using the same rigour with which I approach other cultures, other people's subcultures. It seemed only fair to do the same with myself.’ The result recalls the collage of keepsakes and photos by the university student’s bed, a shrine to another era of life while building a new one. In Coming and Going, Goldberg is another everyday Odysseus, whose project is simple if not colossal: return home (victoriously, if possible). Live well.
Toothpick palm trees in the flicker of a cathode-ray tube are nuclear in their nostalgia. ‘They represent the kind of images that I was seeing on my travels. Be it on a plane or in my parents’ house, the TV screen was omnipresent.’ Stacking up frames and formats, Goldberg probes the medium of photography itself and invites the viewer to look again: some phosphors glow brighter than others, the screen fresh with a sweeping abstract pattern. The palm trees, as if in the haze after a blast, seem on the one hand threatening, on the other ‘soothing, like a tropical vacation.’
In The Audition, another frame-within-a-frame: the vertical stripes of a glittery curtain spill down like an Ian Davenport painting, reflecting across an empty stage. It is a work after Sally Bowles herself: life is a cabaret, old chum. The largescale print of this work in Goldberg’s studio only enhances the sense that ‘you can go up on stage and dance.’ The scene prickles with anticipation. ‘Something’s about to change.’
Other works portray a more ambiguous relationship to change. A portrait of Goldberg’s daughter Ruby as a child playing with daisies was taken in the aftermath of the photographer’s divorce – ‘a hard thing, especially with a child. But there were a lot of happy moments, a lot of wonderful moments,’ Goldberg says, ‘and my relationship with her just got stronger and stronger. And it just kept blossoming into something else – I don't mean to use a flower metaphor.’ Maybe not, yet the photograph has an idiomatic texture: simple pleasures and staple food (fresh daisies, a glass of milk and a gnawed corncob) conspire to make the entire scene feel tried, true and nourishing. After all, life is not always sunshine and daisies, especially when you have got a lot on your plate… since it is not clear exactly which metaphor the viewer ought to reach for, the image itself remains with her as the visual equivalent of a handy phrase.
Coming and Going tempers its light ways of seeing – daisy-tinted glasses and flashy curtains – with a willingness to look at things head on. A portrait of Ruby as a young woman and her step-sister Catalina sees the pair gutting a fish (dinner; memento mori) and it was taken at a cabin in Montana during the Covid-19 pandemic when restrictions meant families had to meet outside. Piles of stones receding to a vanishing point evoke the years, serendipity and unphased natural forces that led to this precise minute, while a tree on the slant suggests how quickly time can get out of joint. Cartoon eyes on Ruby’s shiny Thai boxing shorts double her own gaze staring back at the viewer.
An image of the stars, labelled ‘for my always missed friends’, likewise tempers its sincerity with playfulness, awe with eeny meeny miny mo. Meanwhile, LOST LOVE, written backwards, says it plainly: relationships, moments, past versions of yourself can be over just like that, even when the rug tassels are still tousled. ‘The book, like a photograph, fixes time,’ says Goldberg. ‘So, there is a stillness now that it's completed.’ Nevertheless, it is about his daughter ‘going back and forth between two households; about things coming into being and things leaving. It's about birth and life and cycles.’ Easy-going as drawings and certificates pinned to on the family fridge yet persistent as an evidence board, Coming and Going never stops insisting we embrace these cycles. ‘It's easy to think there's a finality to it, because it's an autobiography, but life goes on,’ Goldberg says. ‘I'm still going.’
Words by Sammi Gale.
