Collection Study
Jim Goldberg, Rich and Poor, 1982

Text by KJ Abudu
April 2020

Rich and Poor is the first major body of work by American artist Jim Goldberg (b. 1953, New Haven, Connecticut) made between 1977 and 1985 in San Francisco. It is composed of over 50 mixed media works that combine silver gelatin prints with handwritten text in black ink. The works measure 35.6 x 27.9 cm.

Now living and working in Northern California, Goldberg’s work has had a strong influence on the development of social documentary photography. He has combined image and text in unique configurations to explore social processes of marginalisation through mechanisms of class, age, and migration.

The series first received wide critical attention in the exhibition, ‘Three Americans’, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1984. This group exhibition also featured works by other notable photographers such as Robert Adams and Joel Sternfeld.

The works from Rich and Poor belong to numerous private and public collections such as The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. The David and Indrė Roberts Collection acquired 10 works from the series in 2006 and 2007 from Atlas Gallery, London.

The series’ monograph, first published in 1985 by Random House and again in 2014 by Steidl, has become a rare collectible item among photography enthusiasts around the world.

Study

In one of Jim Goldberg’s works from his acclaimed series, Rich and Poor, two middle-aged women stand inside a modestly sized, mid-century modern kitchen. They are both naturally lit by a window above the sink, and by a glass door at the kitchen’s rear that opens out to an ivy-clad wall. One of the women, presumably white, wears a structured blouse and a long skirt with a beaded necklace, embodying the self-serious look of the empowered, modern woman – the aesthetic by-product of second-wave feminism. She stands closer to the ‘light’ and adopts a poised bodily comportment, her hands caressing the top of the kitchen counter. The other woman, notably of colour, stands behind her white female counterpart, and further away from the natural light source, her left side almost blurring into the shadows of the background. She wears a white apron over her collared dress, with her arms folded behind her back, as if waiting to be called upon.

We can deduce from the elegant cursive handwriting below the black and white photograph that the white woman is Mrs Stone, who is described as “rich”. We can further deduce that the person writing the note is the domestic worker in the photograph, Vickie Figueroa, who expresses that she is “used to standing behind Mrs Stone”. Figueroa, likely a Latino woman, also confesses that “her dream was to become a schoolteacher” and that she “has talents but not opportunity”. Her American Dream – probably one that her, or her parents, or her grandparents, had when they made the risky decision to migrate northwards from South America – is woefully undermined by the last crushing (but unsentimentally written) sentence that reads “I have been a servant for 40 years”.

Within this work of seemingly quotidian and regional significance, Goldberg exposes a plurality of intersecting global power structures at play: the social, political and economic advancement of white women at the expense of women of colour; the invisibilised exploitation of migrant labour, especially within the domestic sphere; and America’s unending failure to deliver one of its foundational promises – equality of opportunity. Goldberg’s rather simple approach – his unique combination of anecdotal, handwritten texts by his subjects and straight-forward black and white photography of the subjects in their homes – creates a space of intimacy (between text and image, the personal and the political, photographer and subject, the viewer and the viewed) that allows for a subtle but expansive unearthing of these historical and contemporary societal relations. Such formal methods ushered in a new critical and aesthetic position vis-à-vis the tradition of social documentary photography.

Goldberg started making Rich and Poor in 1977 shortly after he moved to San Francisco. He recounts:

Around the time I moved to San Francisco, I met a guy on the street who was trying to sell me drugs in what was considered a ‘bad’ part of town, where I was living at the time. I asked if I could go back to his hotel room and trade him his picture instead. I started knocking on the hotel doors and photographing the neighbours. I made a little book, and had my subjects write next to their photographs.¹
– Jim Goldberg

¹ Goldberg quoted in an interview with Cecilia Lucas Stucker in “Jim Goldberg”, So It Goes, Issue 12, 2018

From Goldberg’s recollection we can observe early stages of the violent partitioning of urban space enabled and structured by the unceasing flow of global financial capital. Goldberg’s description of the ‘bad’ part of town alludes to the disciplinary, dispossessive logic of the modern city; its tendency to contain the Other – socially expendable life, surplus labour – within highly surveilled and policed spatial reserves. Goldberg’s Rich and Poor series illuminates this space-class divide and, in a sense, prefigures the destructive neoliberal policies that Ronald Reagan, elected four years after the series began, would impose on the American population, directing its economy on a decades- long trajectory of ever-increasing income and wealth inequality.

One can identify the later stages of the neoliberal project by looking not too far from where (and when) Rich and Poor was photographed; to the rapid technological advancements of Silicon Valley companies beginning in the 1990s. By converting masses of harvested consumer data into digitised capital, these tech companies have engendered a younger and more mobile elite economic class, and in doing so have made San Francisco the second most expensive city to live in the United States, as well as the American city with the fifth highest rate of homelessness. Such wildly co-existing (but starkly interdependent) realities make the central message of Rich and Poor perhaps more urgent now than at the time of its conception.

At the time of exhibiting the series in 1984 at the Museum of Modern Art Goldberg believed that their public display would directly incite political change.² With age, the artist’s political idealism has softened ever so slightly, prioritising aesthetic radicalism over political radicalism, and accumulated small changes over large sweeping transformations, without, of course, eschewing the work’s foregrounding of the social.³ Given Goldberg’s primarily aesthetic concerns, or rather, how the aesthetic informs, colludes with, and metamorphosises into the ‘political’, I want to look closely at Goldberg’s juxtaposition of text and image, briefly explicating the (political) implications of his formal methods on the practices and discourses of the documentary photography genre.

² Randy Kennedy, “This Is What Wealthy Looked Like”, The New York Times, 2014

³ Sean O’ Hagan, “The photographer who caught the heartbreak on both sides of America’s social divide”, The Guardian, 2014

In another work from Rich and Poor, a black man appears by the left side of the photographic frame, both hands clasped in front, with a soft look that doesn’t quite meet the viewer’s gaze. Assessing the image purely on its visual grounds allows for a plurality of (potentially problematic) interpretations: is this man a shabby bohemian? A recovering drug addict? A menacing criminal? A lonely outcast? An undetected threat to society? The interpretation the viewer ultimately chooses is often conditioned by pre-established ways of seeing; by their immersion in an image culture that inscribes pathological tendencies onto certain bodies.

Indeed, looking back to the history of photography, one can consistently identify the instrumentalization of photography in affirming dubious European colonial ideologies regarding the African or Asian ‘Other’. Photographs, in the form of ethnographic and sociological studies commissioned by imperial state administrations, served to de-humanise enslaved or colonised subjects by rendering them cogni- tively mute, unquestionably violent and/or exceedingly sexual. The modern legacy of ‘race’, namely, the indexation of visuality as a form of biopolitical control, still haunts us today via a network of state apparatuses; for example, in the extrapolative use of photographic ‘evidence’ in judicial courts and in the panoptic logic of visual surveillance technologies deployed by state intelligence agencies.

This colonial/exoticizing/Othering gaze has also seeped into the photo-documentary genre, reproducing violent ways of seeing on the very subjects that socially conscious photographers purport to care for. Goldberg, likely cognisant of the historical power imbalance between photographer and subject, attempts to ameliorate the terms of documentary practice by allowing his photographed subjects to write about themselves. By ascribing agency to his subjects through text, Goldberg sidesteps (at least, partially) the hitherto common problem of alienating the subjects from the work. The final work morphs from a collaborative effort that decentres Goldberg’s subjectivity and – especially when working class, gendered or racialised subjects are involved - resists any conscious or unconscious visual objectification.

Returning to the work just mentioned, we can see that through the use of handwritten text, the photo- graphed black subject, Ferdinand, is able to make declarative statements about his selfhood. “I am a homosexual”. Almost instantly, the viewer is reminded of the historical and geographical setting in which this series was produced – 1970s San Francisco, an urban haven that at the time witnessed radical, utopic practices of sexual freedom and queer self-fashioning. “Maybe if I send one of the pictures you gave to me Jim to my nephew he will understand how hard his uncle is struggling”. Ferdinand’s vulnerable, punctuation-free note prompts speculative thoughts in the viewer: Is he estranged from his family? If so, is this because of his sexuality? And why exactly is he struggling? The unknowability of his history speaks not only of the obscurity of the historical photographic subject in general but of black queer life in particular. Goldberg’s image and Ferdinand’s words produce an affective register of loss, alienation and a coming-to-terms – all markers of the ephemeral, contingent, category-defying thing we’ve come to associate with queerness.

Goldberg mobilises both image and text to approximate the slipperiness and multi-dimensionality of ‘truth’. Aware that a purely visual approach could undermine the ideological foundation of his artistic project, he rather views his images as “proof” that he met these subjects – “proof that they actually have lives, and that they’re worth considering”.⁴ He refers to his multimedia approach as “total documentation”.⁵ The term hints at the shortfalls of documentary practice, injecting the tradition with much needed self-reflexive critique. Further, from an aesthetic viewpoint, the distinctive expressiveness of his subject’s handwriting imbues each of his works with their own personality, mitigating the photograph’s capacity for infinite reproduction as well as its de-personalised, mechanical capture of reality. In a sense, in Rich and Poor, the written notes – subjective and unique in content and form – caress the photograph’s rigid contours, calling into question its documentative claims of objectivity.

⁴4 Goldberg quoted in an interview with Aaron Schuman in “In Conversation with Jim Goldberg”, SeeSaw, 2011
⁵ Ibid.

We see this in certain works where what the subjects express textually contradicts how they present themselves in front of the camera. Thus, the fallibility of the photograph, as articulated by the handwritten anecdotes, not only reroutes the viewer’s ideological preconceptions of the subjects, but exposes the theatricality at play in photographic portraiture. For example, in one work in which a casually dressed couple pose in their tastefully furnished and spacious living room, the viewer might be led to believe in the couple’s somatic expression of contentment – a sanguine state that, surely, ought to accompany great material privilege. However, the first sentence in the text immediately undoes this visual reading. The male partner, Ron, sitting in his large stately home confesses, with much irony, that he feels “trapped”. Ron’s economic accomplishments, we learn, derive from his crippling anxieties of social status and his fear of “being a loser”. His performance of white straight male solidity (and whiteness in general) is exposed for what it is – a façade of superiority that represses deep-seated fears of social, economic and political insecurity.

In Rich and Poor, this chasm between the subjects’ interiority (represented in text, albeit imperfectly) and their performed exterior self (represented in the image) reflect certain universal truths about the human condition. Looking at the range of people and places featured in the series, from the haves in their trendy modernist interiors to the have-nots in their derelict cramped studios, we find strikingly similar sentiments that unite both groups – the desire to be loved and to feel valued, the fear of death and ageing, and the difficulty of self-acceptance. Such sentiments are informed by, but ultimately transcend prescribed categories of race, class and gender. And this is the ultimate paradox of Rich and Poor – a body of work that in revealing stark socio-economic divides points to thoughts and feelings that are of universal resonance. Goldberg achieves this humanist feat by using the camera as an “exploratory tool” that draws him closer to his subjects, allowing for a felt sense of intimacy – an affective quality that a photojournalistic approach overly burdened with concerns of ‘interrogation’ or ‘analysis’ would not allow. What I call his ‘docu- mentary of care’ informs his other notable bodies of work, including Raised by Wolves (focusing on marginalised youth in California), Nursing Home (looking at elderly nursing home residents in Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Open See (zooming in on refugees and immigrants affected by the European migration crisis).

Successive generations of photographers, likely conscious of Goldberg’s legacy, have adapted his honest social documentary approach to contemporary contexts, especially in the digital sphere. Akin to Goldberg’s Rich and Poor series, Brandon Stanton’s popular Instagram account, Humans of New York, pairs portraits of New Yorkers from all walks of life with textual transcriptions of their verbal expressions. In recent years, Stanton has even broadened his geographic scope to feature people from all continents. We find the same coalescence of the particular and the universal in his digital posts, from playful recollections of the beginnings of a life-long relationship to painful reflections on the death of a loved one. The popularity of the account (with over 10 million followers), and the empathetic support that its virtual followers express for Stanton’s subjects, through thousands of uplifting comments, give credence to Goldberg’s measured optimism for a slightly better world:

“Of course I hope that things change and get better, but whether my work, or anybody else’s work, does that or not, I don’t know. I’m just making work and hoping that some people look at it and like it and maybe do something with it.”⁶

⁶ Goldberg quoted in an article by Shelley Jones in “In my own words: Jim Goldberg, photo storyteller”, Huck, 2016