Coming
and Going

Two lookalike kittens sidle up so close together on the centreline of a photograph they could be a Rorschach test. So, what do you see? Pairs: a cactus and a fern, two toy trucks on the bookshelf behind them. A newspaper headline about 'R.E.M' refers to the rock band rather than rapid eye movement – yet there is something soporific about the scene. This is the kind of cosy scene you’d at least hope to see in a Rorschach ink blot. There is an on-your-deathbed normality and overabundance in the prints and pages by Jim Goldberg: huh, so that’s what life was about.

‘The way that I look at the world is not just through a singular viewpoint,’ Goldberg says, ‘it’s almost like I’m seeing a montage’. Renowned for his playful approach to documentary photography, including collage and annotation (often by his subjects), his new book Coming and Going sees Goldberg pointing the camera inward, on himself and his family, from the 1980s to the present day. ‘There's discomfort in moments, to be intimate and vulnerable. But I think that's a necessary thing as an artist – to be open to using the same rigour with which I approach other cultures, other people's subcultures. It seemed only fair to do the same with myself.’ The result recalls the university student collage of keepsakes and photos by her bed, a shrine to another era of life while building a new one. In Coming and Going, Goldberg is another everyday Odysseus, whose project is simple if not colossal: return home (victoriously, if possible). Live well.

Toothpick palm trees in the flicker of a cathode-ray tube are nuclear in their nostalgia. ‘They represent the kind of images that I was seeing on my travels. Be it on a plane or in my parents’ house, the TV screen was omnipresent.’ Stacking up frames and formats, Goldberg probes the medium of photography itself and invites the viewer to look again: some phosphors glow brighter than others, the screen fresh with a sweeping abstract pattern. The palm trees, as if in the haze after a blast, seem on the one hand threatening, on the other ‘soothing, like a tropical vacation.’

Elsewhere, another frame-within-a-frame: the vertical stripes of a glittery curtain spill down like an Ian Davenport painting, reflecting across an empty stage. It is a work after Sally Bowles herself: life is a cabaret, old chum. A largescale print in the photographer’s studio enhances the sense that ‘you can go up on stage and dance.’ The scene prickles with anticipation. ‘Something’s about to change.’

Other works portray a more ambiguous relationship to change. A portrait of Goldberg’s daughter Ruby as a child playing with daisies was taken in the aftermath of the photographer’s divorce – ‘a hard thing, especially with a child. But there were a lot of happy moments, a lot of wonderful moments,’ Goldberg says, ‘and my relationship with her just got stronger and stronger. And it just kept blossoming into something else – I don't mean to use a flower metaphor.’ Maybe not, yet the photograph has an idiomatic texture: simple pleasures and staple food (fresh daisies, a glass of milk and a gnawed corncob) conspire to make the entire scene feel tried, true and nourishing. After all, life is not always sunshine and daisies, especially when you have got a lot on your plate… since it is not clear exactly which metaphor the viewer ought to reach for, the image itself remains with her as the visual equivalent of a handy phrase.

Coming and Going tempers its light ways of seeing – daisy-tinted glasses and flashy curtains – with a willingness to look at things head on. A portrait of Ruby as a young woman and her step-sister Catalina sees the pair gutting a fish (dinner; memento mori). Taken at a cabin in Montana during the Covid-19 pandemic when restrictions meant families had to meet outside, more than most photographs this is a snatched moment. Piles of stones receding to a vanishing point evoke the years and serendipity that led to this precise minute; a tree on the slant suggests how quickly time can get out of joint. The tigers on Catalina’s T-shirt speak whimsically of arbitrary and unphased forces of nature, while cartoon eyes on Ruby’s shiny Thai boxing shorts double her own gaze staring back at the viewer.

An image of the stars, labelled ‘for my always missed friends’, also tempers its sincerity with playfulness, awe with eeny meeny miny mo. Meanwhile, LOST LOVE, written backwards, says it plainly: relationships, moments, past versions of yourself can be over just like that, even when the rug tassels are still tousled. ‘The book, like a photograph, fixes time,’ says Goldberg. ‘So, there is a stillness now that it's completed.’ Nevertheless, it is about his daughter ‘going back and forth between two households; about things coming into being and things leaving. It's about birth and life and cycles.’ Easy-going as drawings and certificates pinned to on the family fridge yet persistent as an evidence board, Coming and Going never stops insisting we embrace these cycles. ‘It's easy to think there's a finality to it, because it's an autobiography, but life goes on,’ Goldberg says. ‘I'm still going.’