Location: Cotati, CA
Medium: Photography, installation, video, mixed media
Website: jimgoldberg.com
Jim Goldberg was born in 1953 in New Haven, Connecticut, and has lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area for most of his adult life, currently based in Cotati in Sonoma County. He received a BA in Photography from Western Washington University in 1975 and an MFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1979, where he studied with Larry Sultan. He is Professor Emeritus at the California College of the Arts and has been a full member of Magnum Photos since 2002. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, LACMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Library of Congress, MFA Boston, MFA Houston, the National Gallery of Art, and the High Museum of Art, among many others.
His awards include three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Photography, a Guggenheim Fellowship (1985), the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award (2007), and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2011). He is represented by Casemore Gallery in San Francisco and Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York.
Goldberg has been working with experimental storytelling for over forty years, developing a landmark approach to social documentary that integrates photography with handwritten text, found objects, video, drawings, diary entries, and other ephemera — refusing the authority of the single image and insisting that his subjects participate in constructing the work’s meaning. His practice is rooted in long-term, in-depth collaboration with communities living outside the mainstream: welfare hotel residents and their wealthy counterparts, runaway teenagers in San Francisco and Los Angeles, nursing home patients, refugees crossing into Europe, the SFJAZZ community. At its core, his work investigates myths about class, power, and happiness — both American and universal. He works in a cinéma vérité tradition, but one that is always aware of its own construction. Martin Parr and Gerry Badger included Raised by Wolves in The Photobook: A History as one of the great photobooks of the 20th century.
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