Jim Goldberg

In 2012, the Eastman Kodak Company declared bankruptcy. That same year, a group of ten photographers from Magnum Photos—Jim Goldberg, Bruce Gilden, Susan Meiselas, Martin Parr, Paolo Pellegrin, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Alec Soth, Larry Towell, Alex Webb, and Donovan Wylie, plus Chien-Chi Chang, who documented the process in audio and video—established a temporary base of operations in Rochester, New York, former home to the once-dominant manufacturer of photographic film. Their goal: to create both a documentary archive of that city’s culture and landscape, and a photo-based experience engaging its residents; and to investigate a community of picture-makers comprised not only of Eastman Kodak, but also the Visual Studies Workshop, George Eastman House, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the citizens of Rochester. Over the course of almost three weeks, photographers, students, faculty, and residents worked together to create a visual record of the city and its people at a time of significant transition. Nathan Lyons, founding director of the Visual Studies Workshop, describes the result as “not only a major documentary project, but a celebration of photography within the city that had for years been a center of imaging technologies.” Upon arrival in Rochester, Martin Parr gave each photographer the task of assembling one hundred photographs to form the basis of an archive. Rochester 585/716 presents all one thousand images, together with commentary by poets Cornelius Eady and Marie Howe, art historian and photo theorist Laura Wexler, and photographer and educator Nathan Lyons. Five sets of the images were printed as a portfolio, each of which now resides in major private and public collections. Two artist proof sets were also created, one of which will be dispersed via the one thousand copies of this publication. Each individual copy contains a single loose print, selected at random from this additional set.

Coming and Going is Jim Goldberg’s unique work of autobiography. Since 1999, Goldberg has been photographing his daily life through all its vicissitudes and returning to his studio to re-imagine and investigate these images through a practice of collage, annotation, montage, and reconstruction for which he has become renowned. This book charts a course through the grief following the death of one’s parents, the life-altering birth of a child, the heartbreak of divorce, and the rediscovery of love. Told using a correspondingly tumultuous blend of singular and combined imagery, personal notes, collages, and ephemera, the book captures the bittersweet realities of an individual life while reflecting on the universal, inescapable comings and goings that shape us and the ways we grow to understand ourselves. Familiar from celebrated works such as Rich and Poor (1985), Raised by Wolves (1995) and Open See (2009), Goldberg’s visual language employs sequence and narrative with a feverish intensity. History, memory, and imagination collide in a vividly material practice to which the influences of fiction and film, and the book form itself, are central. Coming and Going offers a fierce, vulnerable, and at times overwhelming account of a life and a search for the elusive universals of experience – an achievement that constitutes Goldberg’s masterwork and a significant contribution to contemporary bookmaking.