Jim Goldberg’s “Rich and Poor”: A Book Review
By: Elise Jackson, Abbey Lee, & Rachel Mann
Introduction
“The personal and political have always been inextricable for Mr. Goldberg,” reporter Randy Kennedy wrote in The New York Times article, “This Is What Wealthy Looked Like.” Kennedy’s article features American artist Jim Goldberg, and sheds light on how Goldberg’s portrait photography provokes contemplation on the human condition. Rich and Poor, Goldberg’s documentary photobook, provokes just such contemplation, asking readers to reflect on both the unfortunate disparities and the stark similarities between rich and poor individuals in San Francisco in the mid 1980s.
Goldberg has worked tirelessly on photos and films, and has exhibited his work in public spaces such as galleries and museums, including the renowned Museum of Modern Art (“Jim Goldberg”). In a project similar to Rich and Poor, a photobook titled Raised by Wolves, Goldberg documents California troubled teens’ unstable adventures running away from their homes and families. Raised by Wolves elicits a similar chilling feeling as do parts of Rich and Poor.
A proponent of embracing the many puzzling questions that life has to offer, Goldberg considers himself a storyteller. To get quality personal narratives, Goldberg carefully fosters relationships with his subjects to learn their unspoken stories. Just as a wilderness explorer embarks on a safari, there’s a sense of discovery as his work defiantly dives into unfamiliar territory.
What is the Book About?
Through his camera lens, Goldberg presents a page-by-page tour of the worlds and words of those that surround us. The book captures people from both ends of the economic spectrum, juxtaposing the differences in lifestyle between those entombed by poverty and those who are free to live in whichever way they please.
By depicting the rich and the poor in their respective environments, we see life as it is lived by our means, which tells a far different story than would portraits taken outside of these contexts. Goldberg’s other key innovation in this book is how he has allowed his subjects to attempt to capture themselves. As part of his process, he asks for their commentary on their own photos, giving the subject an opportunity to add context, personality, and self-perception to each photo in handwritten reflections. These annotations change not only the meaning of the book, but also the meaning of the act of taking the photos.
While each of Goldberg’s photographs appears deceptively simple (can any good photo ever be simple?), these photos combine with the text to give a rich portrait of each person. We delve deep, as viewers, into the meaning behind not only the person in the photo, but the meaning of their surroundings. Though Goldberg never explicitly points it out, these surroundings can do more to alter a person than we ever care to imagine.
Background Information
San Francisco, where all of the book’s photos were taken, began going through a significant period of gentrification in the late 1970s. It was at this time that the first photos for Rich and Poor were shot. As you can see in this picture — which shows the progress of one location from store to culture center — San Francisco was in a period of considerable change.
Gentrification replaces neighborhoods full of poor people with more wealthy people. All of the people on the poor side of Goldberg’s book, in fact, lived in the same small and cramped hotel.
The Production of Rich and Poor
From 1977 to 1985, Goldberg shot the photos and collected the text for Rich and Poor. He then exhibited the annotated photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1984. In 1985, Random House published the work as a book. Rich and Poor subsequently went out of print, but in 2014, Steidl published a second edition. The revised version is bigger and better than ever before — available in hardcover and featuring photos that had never been exhibited or published. Perfect for a curious soul’s coffee table, this redesigned edition is 9.7 inches by 12.7 inches with a 1-inch spine, has a contemporary minimally-designed front cover and back cover, and a vintage-looking inside cover.
Republishing Rich and Poor gave Goldberg a chance to digitize his earlier analog work. His process involved going through his 30-year-old contact sheets, re-editing some shots, and then scanning to a digital format. Looking at the photos years later, Goldberg gained greater insight. In a Time article by Phil Bicker, Goldberg said:
“I feel like I was looking at these images with a critical distance for the first time. I’m now able to separate my own impulses with the overarching history/context of what was happening in the 70’s and 80’s.”
In the revised edition, Goldberg also printed images that were not in the original book. Some images stand on their own without text in the new version, something which Goldberg says he perhaps didn’t have the courage to do in the the earlier edition.
To merge the past with the present, Goldberg revisits some original subjects and photographs where they exist today. He includes these shots in a panorama in the book’s insert.
The Photographs Themselves
The massive stature of each photo that Goldberg presents to us, in addition to the weight of the book itself, can be easy seen as a metaphor for the weight of the issue at hand: the ever-present, and very much growing, issue of income inequality in America. All in black and white, from photo to text to cover jacket, the design of the book further reinforces Goldberg’s desire to display the disparities of the subject matter. One of Goldberg’s finer, and more nuanced approaches is the similar quality of all photos; each is high quality, heavily detailed, and seems to make a point of equalizing the level of detail. It is as if Goldberg couldn’t quite bring himself to make the disparity between rich and poor too visually obvious.
Goldberg’s art is restrained: he takes his picture, and allows the subject to add meaning through their annotations. Although as an artist this was likely difficult — the artist always wants to capture better and better shots — it was important for the photos to be equal in impact and weight.
Text and Photo Tactics in Rich and Poor
One curious aspect of this work is that the book goes straight into photographic content. There’s not much text before the series of images begins — no introduction, no foreword. One reason Goldberg may use this strategy is to allow the viewer to experience the rawness of the photos and the accompanying handwritten text.
The book’s photos are on white matte paper and the photos dominate and drive the book’s content. On most photos, adding to the effect of the photos is black handwritten text written by each photo’s respective subject. The text, which looks like it was written in a black marker or pen, adds an additional layer of meaning to the photo and a personal touch. Most pages have one photo and between one and five sentences of accompanying text.
There is some variety in Goldberg’s arrangement of images, perhaps to keep the reader engaged. Most photos are on the right-hand side of the book’s spine, while the left side remains blank. Perhaps Goldberg intended to give the viewer some space to reflect on the books’ ideas. Or, perhaps the surplus of empty white pages in this work may draw more emphasis to the richness of Goldberg’s photos themselves.
Some of the larger photos in the new edition seem to be close ups or just photos that Goldberg wanted to emphasize more, perhaps without the distraction of text. While there is no color photography on the pages of the book, there is an insert in the back with several photos expanding into a color panorama.
Themes in Rich and Poor
Many of the poor people in the book are struggling, though some seem content and others seem desperate to get rich. The rich people in the book insist that they still have problems, even if they are “running such a big house” or “the servants are wearing spotless white uniforms.”
Most of the couples that are photographed seem very unhappy in their relationship. One person, Manny García, said that seeing the photograph with his partner made him want to cry. Many of the relationships are characterized by misunderstanding: Goldberg emphasizes this misunderstanding by putting the same picture on both sides of the page, with a different person’s thoughts written below each photo. This technique shows that there really are two sides to every story.
Ideas For Your Own Writing
Goldberg describes himself as “a documentary storyteller”, and in various interviews, he has emphasized the importance of process:
“Being a teacher for so long, I’ve realized that so much of what you teach students is about learning to respect the importance of process. Watching students grow is interesting — and them observing my process helps them see that it’s not that mysterious of a thing to do. In order to figure this artmaking stuff out, it’s trial and error and experimentation, and takes some time and hard thinking. Putting work out in many forms and stages is an extension of how I see things. I feel the art process is best served when it invites comments and constructive criticism from people. It’s a strategic gesture, too, because the feedback I receive helps me move forward with my ideas, which is what process is about — to craft and evolve something.”
Although only armed with a camera and a theme, Goldberg allowed the questions he wanted to explore to come through the lens, sometimes clear and focused, and other times leaving a viewer hanging, forcing them to think about those questions for themselves. For those of us looking to learn or garner inspiration, Goldberg’s experiences with Rich and Poor and elsewhere leave with with a sense of longing, not only to capture, but to allow those around us to be captured within their stories. , as he explains in his commentary of his documentary practice:
As the captor, and ultimately caretaker, of the subject’s image, it is not a lack of courage by Goldberg to allow the images to stand alone. It is rather a recognition that allowing subjects to speak about their own images can yield a greater truth than photographs alone.
Finally, to channel Goldberg, we leave you with the following exercise:
- Find a friend, family member, or acquaintance that you’d like to learn more about.
- Ask them to sit for a portrait. Take their photo with a camera phone, a digital camera, or a Polaroid camera.
- Once you have the portrait completed, print it, and show it to the subject.
- Give the subject a permanent marker, and have them write what the photo means to them.
You can do this with a Polaroid camera at a party, and the results would be instantaneous! Or you could do it with an iPhone, and have your subject edit a caption with a photo-editing app.
By doing this exercise, we think you will not only better understand Goldberg’s important work, but also begin to think in new ways about the complex ethics of capturing people in photographs.
Citations
Amazon. www.amazon.com/Jim-Goldberg-Rich-Poor/dp/3869306882. Accessed 18 Oct. 2017.
Bicker, Phil. “High and Low: Jim Goldberg’s Works in Process.” Time.com. n.d. Web. 17 Oct. 2017. <http://time.com/47371/high-and-low-jim-goldbergs-works-in-process/>
Goldberg, Jim. OJ. 15 Aug. 2014. Rich and Poor.
Goldberg, Jim. Raised by Wolves. Compiled by Philip Brookman, 2nd ed., New York, Zurich, 1997.
Goldberg, Jim. Robert L. Mitchell. 15 Aug. 2014. Rich and Poor.
Goldberg, Jim. Stew. 15 Aug. 2014. Rich and Poor.
Goldberg, Jim. Vickie and Mrs. Stone. 15 Aug. 2014. Rich and Poor.
“Jim Goldberg.” Artsy, www.artsy.net/artist/jim-goldberg. Accessed 17 Oct. 2017.
Loarca, Carlos, Betsie Miller-kusz, Manuel Villamor. “Spirit of the Arts.” SFCED, 1976, Mission Cultural Center for the Latino Arts (MCCLA), San Francisco.
Sarina Finkelstein. “The Photo Bank: RICH AND POOR by photographer Jim Goldberg.” Time.com. n.d. Web. 17 Oct. 2017. <http://time.com/money/3055901/jim-goldberg-rich-poor-income-inequality/>
Sean O’Hagan. “The photographer who caught the heartbreak on both sides of America’s social divide.” the Guardian. 3 Jul. 2014. Web. 17 Oct. 2017. <http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/03/jim-goldberg-rich-and-poor-photography>
Kennedy, Randy. “This Is What Wealthy Looked like.” The New York Times, 24 July 2014. The New YorkTimes, www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/arts/design/jim-goldberg-hopes-his-pictures-still-make-a-difference.html. Accessed 17 Oct. 2017.
