Coming and Going

Jim Goldberg has spent more than two decades creating the work that forms Coming and Going, a unique work of autobiography. Since 1999, Goldberg has been photographing his daily life through all its vicissitudes and returning to his studio to digest and narrativize these images through a practice of collage, annotation, montage, and reconstruction for which he has become renowned. Dissecting an individual life with rigorous candour and confessional directness, the book equally tells a wider story of the universal shape of our lives through their loves and losses, comings and goings, and the ways we come to understand them. Here we see an artist attempting to confront mortality without melancholy. Familiar from celebrated works such as Raised by Wolves (1995) and Open See (2009), Goldberg’s visual language employs sequence and narrative with feverish intensity to reflect the constant movement and mutability of life. History, memory, and imagination collide in this vividly material practice, to which the influences of fiction and film, and the book form itself, are central. Goldberg offers a fierce, vulnerable, and at times overwhelming accounting of a life in search of the elusive universals of personal experience – one that constitutes his magnum opus and a significant contribution to contemporary bookmaking.