jim goldberg presentation

Jim Goldberg

• "I have the great privilege of being both witness and storyteller. Intimacy, trust and intuition guide my work."

Open See• Started as a Magnum commission in Greece in

2004• Shows experiences of refugee, immigrant and

trafficked populations

• While working he won the HCB award which helped him continue his work and travel to Ukraine, Bangladesh, Liberia

• “Though Goldberg's work is political, he is uncomfortable with the term, describing himself instead as "a documentary storyteller".

• Asking questions, not giving answers, not trying to be political

Style• Polaroids, medium format, video, handwriting

• Consists of small “personal” images, and images where you stand back and get an overview, a context

• Lets the subject write and draw on the images• The subjects aren’t passive, but get to tell their

story in their own words• The variety of the medium he uses, and the

different look of the images can represent the diversity in people and the differences

Analysis

• ‘Open See’ can be interpreted several ways

- The work is about freedom or the lack of it- It is a common way for refugees to travel- Encourage people to open their eyes and see

what is going on- It is a mistranslation which can represent a

language barrier and differences

• "We understand a historical document intellectually, but we understand a human document emotionally“

• Symbolic• Birds are freedom, but crows are also death• in the book they work as symbol and "pauses“

in the big amount of portraits

• At first it connotes naivety, but after a while it changes into a sad realisme

• Mystery, we don’t understand all of the text• We imagine her future, compare it to the

other images we have seen

The Prize

• “The point of the Deutsche Börse, like the Turner, seems to be to stir public interest in the kind of photography the general public would not normally be aware of, never mind go and see”

• “These intermediate documents increase our knowledge of public facts, but sharpen it with feeling...”

• “The problematic issues that dog contemporary photographic reportage – the immigrant as spectacle, the desensitisation of the viewer through the sheer volume of images of suffering – are addressed indirectly within the work, which often takes the form of a kind of creative collaboration”