“My dream was to get out of New Haven,” writes Jim Goldberg in his 2017 photobook, Candy, a coming-of-age story that tracks his 1973 move west and the beginnings of his life as an artist, a seeker, and a man in near-constant motion. Goldberg’s eye was attuned to inequality. His first book, Rich and Poor (1985), combined black-and-white portraits of wealthy and impoverished subjects with their hand-scrawled notes, revealing a layer of tenderness and remove in not only his newly adopted city of San Francisco but photography more broadly. Raised by Wolves (1995), a ten-year effort to chronicle the dizzying, often tragic lives of teenage runaways, became a cult classic book, in addition to an exhibition, using tactics that explode image and text with found and salvaged artifacts.
In the years since, evidence of the artist’s existence—what he’s held, literally and figuratively—has become raw material for his investigations of aging, human trafficking, transgender love, and much more. While storytellers look outward, so too do they point inward, and Goldberg’s new book (though the word feels too contained, too manageable) is packed with the characters and questions of his own life.
He began the 360-page (2023) in 1999, well before its full content actually existed, like planting the seed of an unknown fruit. He had some living to do—loving, breaking up, losing his parents, and raising a daughter. Last fall, I met Goldberg at his studio north of San Francisco. We spoke about , a project twenty-four years in the making, which chronicles wild highs and dismal lows alongside the casual, nearly parenthetical
