Chaos and Treasure

Some years ago I visited a publisher of many fine books of photography to propose one of my own that would include both pictures I’d made and essays I was going to write. He was skeptical. “People read lying down on a couch or a bed,” he said, “but books of photographs are for sitting at a table or holding in one’s lap. How are you going to do both?” When it was eventually brought out by someone else, I gave a copy to an eminent professor I’d known in college, and he said he loved the text. “But what about the pictures?” I asked. Oh, those were terrific too, he said mildly—literature was his field—but the writing was what mattered. A bit later a student of mine, a very talented photographer, told me loyally that the pictures were great but that she hadn’t read the words. “You should,” I said sadly, but I knew that she never would.

Mixing photographs with text wasn’t actually rare—history and travel books did it; so did the picture magazines of a departed age. Numerous photographers have written with feeling and logic—Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Robert Adams, and Daido Moriyama are some—and it’s said that in Many Are Called (completed in 1941 and published twenty-five years later), Evans, generally a purist, hoped to accompany his furtive subway portraits with snatches of overheard speech,¹ perhaps like those in the work of John Dos Passos or in The Waste Land, which Evans revered. This suggests a hunger for what pictures can only imply. Unlike writing, photographs can’t talk of before or after, of sound or movement, or say what inhabits anyone’s mind, and while they can be potent objective correlatives, they are clumsy with metaphor. Much of their force lies in their physical richness and the speed with which they strike us, while reading takes time and contemplation. I often feel that, at bottom, we look to images to ask ourselves What? or Where? and to narrative to ask Why?, trying stubbornly to bring these questions into alignment. Wright Morris was just one author who insisted on touching all of them. Seeking a kind of graphic Gesamtkunstwerk, he produced several books that he called “photo-texts.”

Where photo-texts appeared, though, pictures were usually segregated from writing—in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which Evans coauthored with James Agee, all his austere photographs were placed strictly ahead of Agee’s impassioned, self-flagellating story, closing their case before one syllable was uttered. Morris was considerably more imaginative when he paired each scene in The Inhabitants (1946) with a brief lyrical composition that mixed travelogue, memoir, and folk wisdom. His pictures showed little but the stark buildings of the American hinterland, absent the settlers who made them, yet his writing was rich with their homespun philosophizing (“You poor bastards…what the hell do you get for slaving, for being alive?”), and if one never saw their faces, the gaps between text and image filled up with their voluble spirits.

A photo-text always risks that its images will wait meekly on its words, or else dominate and make mere captions of them (W.G. Sebald gave up much of the beauty and depth of the photographs in his novels by keeping them grainy, blurry, and as small as postage stamps). Certain books have gotten them to collaborate, however, through putting them in ironic opposition, like Peter Beard’s The End of the Game (1965), which combined the thunderous lions and rhinos of the Kenya highlands with his mournful prose (“The deeper [white men] went into Africa, the faster the life flowed out”). In Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), Michael Lesy set nineteenth-century portraits of the inhabitants of Black River Falls and its outlands against gothic old news accounts of murder, betrayal, and suicide, as well as bits from a logbook from the Mendota State Hospital for the Insane, making the reader wonder how such frightful events could be so profuse among such decorous people.

Another great constraint in producing any artist’s book of photographs is that the camera tends to keep its operator looking outward from a single point of view, imprisoned in the role of magisterial observer, unable to pivot from the clouds in the blue to the thought in the mind, and then to questioning that thought—unable to say “I” except obliquely. This was surely one of the qualities that made Baudelaire call photography soulless and mechanical (his complaint endured at least through Susan Sontag), and some photographers have purposely done work so window-like that even their ardent supporters could struggle to find them in it. “Where’s the art?” the renowned curator John Szarkowski wondered, famously, when he first saw Evans’s pictures.

Arbus and Robert Frank, though, both favorites of Evans, are revered for coaxing photography to speak strongly in the first person. Many more photographers were straining to do so in the 1960s and 1970s, when the old photojournalists’ pretense of objective truth-telling swiftly dissolved. Personal script was found to be highly evocative, and around the same time Cy Twombly showed in painting that words and letters worked as expressive figures, not just descriptive language, Arbus demonstrated that writing the words that accompanied her photographs by hand could give them more strength than they would have in type. When, for an early version of her now-beloved image of a child in suspender shorts at the end of his rope in Central Park, she wrote “Exasperated boy with hand grenade,” her idiosyncratic lettering and the tender “exasperated” made you feel sympathy, pity—even that the child was her alter ego.

Frank’s The Lines of My Hand (1972) was another revelation of those days. While his celebrated The Americans (1959) was powerfully felt, it still looked strictly at; the new book was full of its author (“Here Together for the First and only Time some of my Friends now gone forever…”). Soon he would produce many images on which he wrote fiercely, and sometimes inconsolably, including one inscribed “sick of goodby’s,” and another—dedicated to his daughter, who died far too young in a plane crash—with “POUR LA FILLE” stretching across the sky above a field of windblown daisies. Alone, the photograph couldn’t have linked her to that frowsy meadow, but with its legend you sense that maybe she’d stood there once, or was like its flowers, or was said to be, or that Frank might have thought her evanescence to be like theirs.

All these streams flowed into the work of the American photographer Jim Goldberg when he was a student in the 1970s, and since that time I doubt that anyone has tried harder to get photographs and text to bring each other to life. It was then that he made a discovery, in various transients’ hotels in San Francisco and Marin, that would serve him for almost fifty years. After photographing the lodgers in their bleak rooms he would dutifully give them prints, but at some point he began asking his subjects to write on some of these—about what they saw, about themselves, even about him and how they doubted or had fallen for him—and then taking the photographs back. I have not heard of anyone doing this before.² Usually a photograph has just one voice—its maker’s—and when Goldberg joined his subjects’ to his own he broke a sort of fourth wall. Image would ask text whether what it said was really true, and text would ask how anyone could know.

The hotels had stained washbasins, pummeled furniture, and wallpaper that could have dated from the Depression, and their inhabitants often trembled: “I hope my Kids wiLL Have a gooD LiFe I Don’T Know iF They wiLL The worLD is A mess,” wrote one. Others were winning: “This makes me look like a Bum—I Am not I Am fantastic Dorothy…The nicest person in the hotel” (though Dorothy looks like she’s been hit in the face). They could also be guileless—“This photo makes me want to cry”—and funny. One luminous girl poses with her mother, whose eyes seem full of injury, and a glowering doll two-thirds her size: “I thincK I’am a good person my mom is nice. I hate the doll LaShawn.”

Goldberg was soon introduced to better-off subjects with posh houses, and working the same way, he then combined the two groups into his first book, Rich and Poor (1985). Among the rich, some were proud (“My life is luxurious and my taste is refined I don’t worry about what people think of me”; “We are aristocratic, well-bred…cultured and civilized”), and some pitied and persecuted themselves (“People are envious of my wealth….I can’t escape being a Zellerbach”). They look healthier, and their grammar and script are better, even if less poignant than the lurching writing of many of the poor, which makes one expect their words to reveal their inner selves as pictures can’t. Neither their goodwill nor Goldberg’s empathy, though, can keep any of them from wearing a mask behind each mask. The beauty of having his sitters write on their photographs turned out to be that Goldberg saw no one’s heart, only the solitude to which everyone was sentenced.

For Raised by Wolves (1995), his second major project, Goldberg shaved his head to enter the world of a scramble of hard-pressed street kids scattered between the Haight, the Tenderloin, and Hollywood Boulevard, sunk in heroin, crack, meth, robbery, dismal sex, filthy squats, pistols, knives, hate, and self-hate. One feels revulsion everywhere in this book, yet also such deep affection that it can seem like he is hugging them to his body with the camera. And while Rich and Poor was orderly (each page showed one picture plus its subject’s declaration), this book was crammed. It had texts by its subjects and by Goldberg himself, both typeset and crudely scribbled, photographs made with all kinds of camera, many bleeding off the page, pictures laid atop other pictures, and arrows marked on many with a pen to tell you, for example, not to miss the scars on one girl’s wrist. It had portraits from various lost childhoods, not just those of Tweeky Dave and Echo, its chief protagonists, and it also introduced the opaque silhouette (in Raised by Wolves, that of a pigtailed girl) that has often reappeared in his later books, suggesting that although a child’s purity may still be perceptible, it is beyond anyone’s reach.

Philip Brookman, the coeditor of Raised by Wolves, has recalled that he and Goldberg reveled in the book’s “mess.” Pushing hundreds of pictures and texts around the floor all day, they set Dave’s delirious howl at its center—“BorN A WiCked ChiLd, rAIsed BY WoLveS, A SCreAmIN kAMAKAZI, I Never wILL CrAsh”—with their prodigious cast of runaways whirling frenetically around it. Able to repair almost nothing, the kids grab after whatever they can as misery eats them, carping relentlessly at one another although they fleetingly adore one another too, until, eventually, the beautiful Echo escapes to a new life back east. She is struggling—to learn computers, to manage her young children on her own—when, at the end, Goldberg gives her the news that Dave, who was “crazy in love with that bitch” (Echo herself), has wretchedly died. Much later, Goldberg would call Dave an “otherworldly devil kid”—he was still half a child when his parents cut him off and he dropped into the abyss. They thought him such a “manifestation of Satan” that they wouldn’t come from Texas even to bury him, leaving his disposal to Goldberg, who saw him instead as “closer to an angel” and took his ashes home to Haight Street to put on a shelf beside his own father’s.

The kids’ fury, disappointment, and craving to be heard are so strong that image and writing overrun each other in Wolves, its texts opening meanings that you might guess the images to hold but can’t be sure of. “For my 12th B-DAY,” says one, “My OLD MAN Grabbed ME and gave me a carton of smokes and a sheet of acid….I would have rather gotten a hug but the only time [he’d] Put his hands On me would be to beat the shit out of me.” This appears opposite a lovely girl who carefully paints her eyes under LA’s hazy streetlights as her vigilant companion caresses her shoulders. The words weren’t actually hers—Goldberg just put them beside her—nor can we know that, as he told me at one point, she was then at the peak of her beauty, warmth, and magnetism (she would lose them dreadfully soon), but they make her radiance seem the obscure miracle that, in fact, it is.

Having his subjects write took Goldberg still further into chaos in Open See (2009), for which he photographed migrants in Europe and followed them back home, people who’d fled persecution, or want, or wars in Africa, or who were traded out of Eastern Europe as goods. Using a Polaroid, he’d have them write on its harsh, rough images right after it disgorged them (Larissa, who told him that she’d once been “a famous dancer,” spells out in neat Russian, “I was sold to terrorists in Macedonia…The club director pointed a gun at me…My fear has left scars on my heart”), and then he’d mix these with other photographs that were sharp, formal, even graceful. The result was a litter of points of view that shift continually as Goldberg switches between seven kinds of camera, and among color, monochrome, clear, blurry, distressed, and abused images, and changes characters and countries.

Open See roams from hovering gulls to ghastly keloids to garbage burning noxiously at dusk; it swells with exhilaration as it enters each new world and leaps from page to page rather like the migrants, who, ejected from their old lives, grasp for new as they hurtle ahead. It has a night-black girl in fluttering pink on a hill of rubble, a debaucher who flagrantly bends a woman in a sari over to mount her as both look back at the camera, and one spread where nothing but green opposes nothing but red. Some of its trafficked women blot themselves out in shame, while other emigrants are so helpless to stop writing that their faces are obliterated by their words, and where one uses Cyrillic cursive, or Telugu or Amharic, you hear an urgent, lonely wail across a vast and trackless water.

Not long ago most photographers were happy with books that were really just containers—one image per page, surrounded by white to assert that it was art. Their struggle for acceptance as artists had led, especially in America, to the purism of Szarkowski’s dictum “Try to say it all in one picture,” which prized consistency of emotional temperature, image size, aspect ratio, clarity, and nearness to subject, mistrusted mixing black and white with color, and marshaled what text it allowed into dull parades of nearly identical pages.

Gradually, though, that severity has waned, and many now cluster and chop up their images without hesitation. The colors and finishes of papers are myriad and delicious; one sees typefaces of mixed design, size, and weight, hand-drawn sketches, washi and translucent barriers, gatefolds, leporellos, tip-ins, exquisite Japanese bindings, and such exotic printing as with the silver ink on black stock that makes the hypersharp faces in Stacy Arezou Mehrfar’s The Moon Belongs to Everyone (2021) say, Don’t forget me. The anarchic penmanship Goldberg found early is now ubiquitous and even turns up in Arabic in Bieke Depoorter’s As it may be (2018), whose Egyptian families scrawl on her pictures from all sides of the tables they sit around, debating such matters as whether women should let themselves be photographed out of hijab.

Most photo-texts probably still hold to the rigid old scheme of picture|writing, picture|writing, where word and image fall easily away from each other, but the elaborations of design one sees today can work powerfully to knit them together. They run throughout Gilles Peress and Chris Klatell’s Annals of the North (2021),³ an encyclopedic account of the Irish Troubles that asks how the eye can get lost in the beauty of the very same scenes where the mind beholds injustice, and again through Attention Servicemember (2019), which merges the disgust and the nostalgia Ben Brody felt after working as a US Army photographer in Iraq and then as an “embed” there and in Afghanistan. No one has been more liberal than Goldberg with overlays of word and image, shifts in the form and scale of script, graphic insertions and mixings of photographic styles. In his later books, they enable picture and writing to inspirit each other much like the music and the words do in songs.

There are hundreds of beauties in Goldberg’s memoir Coming and Going (2023), a ragged magnum opus that covers all the forty-odd years since his youth, whose thousands of pictures (many so small that you just glance) must set a record for sheer quantity, and whose words flow so copiously that image and text become one body. When I told Goldberg about books one reads lying down vs. those one reads sitting up, he said he wished this one could be read lying down, but…(he said recently that he wished he could say that it had a million pictures). It touches on his early wanderings to Burma and Peru, his afflicted first marriage, his father’s cancer and his parents’ deaths, his daughter’s birth, his divorce and the oblivion that followed, all of it a torrent whose recurring pain subsides only when a new wife and child appear in the book’s ultimate phase. It says “I” as no photographic book has except his own, simpler The Last Son (2016) and Candy (2017), which recall his boyhood as a New Haven townie who longed to flee but lacked the recklessness of the outcasts of Raised by Wolves. It has writing both in and outside its pictures, kaleidoscopic collages, oozing frames that melt in the fever a so-called shaman gave him in Mexico, and one swoon of nothing but red and gold.

Coming and Going was a feat of hoarding before it was anything else. Never sure whether he’d publish them someday, Goldberg preserved not just his own pictures of his family’s life but other people’s too, along with memoranda of desire (“Jimmy—I can still smell you”), of laughter, when he and his first wife still laughed (“Number of times each was right: Jim/Susan”), and of farewell (“I am crying all the time”). He kept lists of the property of the dead as it turned to dust and of his household as it did too, and he photographed his mother’s jewelry (found under her sink), toys his daughter once cherished but later abandoned, twenty-four locks of his and her (and still others’) hair, the X-rays with which they jostled over how many cavities each had (he lost by a mile), and seventeen of her toothbrushes.

One of the camera’s greatest charms is its mobility, which inspires so many of its artists—like Goldberg himself—to travel far, but Coming and Going burrows into the exceedingly near: not the inner being, where photography can’t go, but under the bed, among the outdated medicines, even into his own eye, pried open by a doctor’s speculum. It is intensely intimate when his mother is rolled into the crematory furnace (“I don’t want to look”), when his daughter paints his toenails, when the aspirin pills scatter all over the floor and her pink feet somehow look guilty (we don’t see her face), and when, on his first wedding night, his new wife faces him half-naked and he grins witlessly, working at his belt.

There is a constant transit between raw and cooked among these photographs, but there is far more raw, and once, when I asked Goldberg about “Say it all in one picture,” he said, “I don’t know how to do that.” A moment later he added, “I’ve always wished that I could make a ‘good’ picture.” This was overmodest—he has made a great many self-sufficient, complex, elegant photographs, as in one late spread where a shaggy white mule heaves mightily to her feet—yet his preference was always for life’s chaos, just as his bashful words are full of urgent, giddy confiding. One utterly pedestrian wide shot shows Goldberg’s family in a parking lot in Tampa, as barren as innumerable others, with a text saying that they’d dug a hole there with their rental car key, then scooped his mother’s ashes into it from a cookie can, what was left of her getting stuck under his fingernails. No one could call this an exemplary photograph, but the sum of its repellently poetic details is a close-up of desperation, and to criticize its artlessness would be to complain on a full stomach.

Though Goldberg’s frequent arrows often feel like ironic instructions, as if to simpleminded readers, Coming and Going finishes with a spread where they point from thirteen names to thirteen stars in the night sky, expressing not irony but adoration and gratitude. Look! they say, this one whom I loved isn’t gone, nor this one either! All thirteen, not lost! Still here! The pain of life rarely stopped—in Florida he found his parents’ remains paved over, and no one to say where they’d been taken—yet love was never absent, and it was what mattered. Here: see my daughter’s twisted orthodontic plates, and the shaman’s condemnation, and my own awkwardness; see these many messy disjunctions between picture and word, beautiful and ugly, clear and defaced images, thoughts complete and thoughts barely apprehended, song-of-myself and self-disgust (“Your feet are tied around your heart,” said the shaman, “your work is not good because of this”). How, when chaos threatens everything, can love persist so strongly? And whose love is it? Does it radiate from the hundreds of people who fill his book? Is it inside Goldberg? Can one know? Does one need to? He ends amazed, as the wonder of seeing defies any explanation he might find for what he sees. Life was a torrent of chaos but a bestower of treasures too, and when, after so much anguish, his second wife and daughter arrive, he unfurls “GOLD/MINE” across two full, triumphant pages.

Recently the much-loved curator Susan Kismaric asked me bitterly if photographers no longer believed in photography. Why did so many complicate their books with words now, and sumptuous design? She’d become a protégé of Szarkowski soon after Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and many others fled photojournalism’s pieties and entered the museums as auteurs. Arbus called the raw camera image “a secret about a secret,” and for it to stand alone, mysterious and apparitional, was seen as a badge of authenticity then. “Try to say it all in one picture” was so much the ideal that it was actually somewhat anomalous for MoMA to give Rich and Poor its debut in 1984. Kismaric herself was its curator.

Pondering this, I wondered if photographers had truly tired of the camera, or whether some simply felt that it was critical now to bring more self into their work, not in order to disrobe or confess or trumpet their own importance but because the camera’s conventional, stubbornly outward seeing sets one apart not just from one’s subjects but from the flux of one’s own uncertain consciousness. Here is Coming and Going’s deep achievement, I thought—not in its tale of disintegration and redemption, sweet though that was, but in how, turning to pictures, then words, then back again, trying ever unsatisfied to understand, Goldberg welcomes the truth that one can’t possibly say it all. There is a new, unfamiliar beauty here. One may never get either one’s images or one’s texts to be perfect and complete, or get the answers to What? and Where? to agree with what one thinks one knows about Why?, but if one weaves them across each other’s paths, moving as erratically yet fluidly as birds in flight, they can sing abundantly of our compulsion to try.