Echo, Four Days Before the Baby Was Born Possibly 1991 - 1994

Jim Goldberg made this photograph, 'Echo, Four Days Before the Baby Was Born,' sometime around when he was born in 1953. Look at the shadow and how it stretches across the frame. I bet that’s how time felt for the mother, stretched and looming. I imagine Goldberg, as a young photographer, finding beauty in the mundane, the in-between moments of life. He’s captured the pregnant woman in a doorway, the ladder propped against the building outside creating a kind of portal. It makes me think of the early work of someone like Nan Goldin, or even Garry Winogrand, and their shared interest in recording the intimate aspects of everyday life. That cigarette looks like it tastes so good! This photograph feels like the start of something new, that feeling right before the curtain rises. It reminds me that artists borrow, steal, and riff off each other all the time.