Jim Goldberg
Magnum Foundation invites you to celebrate the Magnum photographer Jim Goldberg’s new autobiographical photobook Coming and Going. Jim will be joined by Philip Brookman, curator and photographer, for a conversation about the book and its 24 year-long process of making. The two will discuss Goldberg’s signature style, the development of the project, and Brookman’s collaborations with Goldberg spanning the last three decades.
This event will begin with a grantee spotlight on our current Magnum Foundation Fellow Destiny Mata and her project the Lower East Side Yearbook.
Wednesday, January 10, 2024 | 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM ET
In-person and online
Doors open at 6:00 PM
59 East 4th St, 7W | New York, NY 10003
About the book:
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.
About the presenters:
Jim Goldberg’s innovative use of image and text make him a landmark photographer of our times. He has worked with experimental storytelling for over forty years, and his major projects and books include Rich and Poor (1977-85), Raised by Wolves (1985-95), Nursing Home (1986), Open See (2003-2009), The Last Son (2016), Candy (2013-2017), Darrell & Patricia (2018), and Coming and Going (1999-2023). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Getty, the National Gallery of Art, LACMA, Fondation A Stichting, Fondazione MAST, and Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe. He is the recipient of numerous awards including three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship (1985), the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award (2007), and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2011). Goldberg is Professor Emeritus at the California College of the Arts and is a member of Magnum Photos. He is represented by Casemore Gallery in San Francisco.
Philip Brookman is consulting curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, where he organized Dorothea Lange: Seeing People; Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950; and Intersections: Photographs and Videos from the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. He is currently working on an exhibition for NGA about the connections between photography and the Black Arts Movement. Brookman was chief curator and curator of photography at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1993–2014), curator and director of programs at Washington Project for the Arts (1987–1992), curator at Centro Cultural de la Raza, San Diego (1984–1986), and curator at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1977–1983). He was a museum fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2020. He is also a photographer, filmmaker, and writer whose book Redlands was published by Steidl in 2014.
Magnum Foundation is in an elevator building and has a restroom that is wheelchair accessible and gender-neutral. For access requests or questions, please contact events@magnumfoundation.org. As a small team, we will better be able to respond to requests made at least one week in advance.
Masks are currently appreciated, but not required. We may provide additional instructions ahead of the event.
Magnum Foundation events are made possible by the Henry Nias Foundation and our Circle of Friends. Additional support for this event was provided by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
