Background information
"The US-American Magnum photographer Jim GOLDBERG has spent more than two decades creating the work that forms 'Coming and Going', a unique work of autobiography. Since 1999, the US-american Magnum photographer 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. Familiar from celebrated works such as 'Raised by Wolves' (1995) and 'Open See' (2009), his visual language employs sequence and narrative with feverish intensity to reflect the constant movement and mutability of life.
Content
Dissecting an individual life with rigorous candour and confessional directness, the book 'Coming and Going' by US-american Magnum photographer Jim GOLDBERG 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. 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. Jim 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." (slightly adpated publishers text, © Mack books, 2023)