Coming and Going | Jim Goldberg
Written by Cate Engles
Jim Goldberg's archive of family photos and personal letters in Coming and Going displays a deeply personal meditation on life and loss that elicits nostalgia in the reader. The book captures the experience of losing a loved one while welcoming a new life almost simultaneously. These two experiences both intersect and parallel one another through the collages that develop throughout the book. Goldberg creates an autobiographical scrapbook with photographs ranging from classic black-and-white film to vivid technicolor prints. He drops in his own annotations while including intimate letters and other ephemera in order to narrate this emotionally tumultuous time in his adulthood. What is unique to Goldberg becomes overwhelmingly familiar to the reader while they travel through the pages of Coming and Going.
Like a proper narrative, Goldberg begins with his predecessors: his parents. Immediately, Goldberg dusts off the storage box from the attic and allows the readers to take a peek into these antiquated family memories. Photographs of his parents at his childhood home, on vacation, and posing for portraits fill the first pages of the book. Each new face is identified with a scribble of their name. As the viewer sifts through each new polaroid, they get a glimpse of Goldberg’s young adult life, culminating in a chronicle of his high-school days with him posing like a classic eighties stud. New girlfriends arrive in the frame just as the last images of his living parents begin to dwindle. Their smiling faces are blissfully ignorant of the captions relaying the truth of these moments: sickness and grief will soon engulf these happy people.
The themes of love and life swiftly take over the following pages with photographs from the birth of Goldberg’s daughter, yet the pain of loss still lingers. Goldberg fuses the two stories– one of death and one of birth–by filling the void his late father leaves with photos of his daughter, Ruby. Goldberg not only brings in her image to replace the presence of his parents, but also of his wife, Susan; because, as the title indicates, nothing in life is stationary.
Coming and Going is the catch-all of Goldberg’s successes and sorrows. It tells the story of a photographer whose camera lens is his greatest crutch but also his best tool. In vulnerable moments, he allows the camera to mark the sentiments of that exact time. Even though the book is deeply autobiographical, the reader can find themselves connecting to the narrative through its broad themes of love and loss. By layering photographs, video stills, paper notes, and even locks of hair, he creates an assemblage of moments that overlap in time for himself and for his reader. There is no start or stop in the storyline of Goldberg’s Coming and Going. The book reminds the reader that time is not linear and the guiding forces of life are constantly in flux.
