Street Map (#12) Possibly 1988 - 1994

Jim Goldberg’s silver gelatin print pulls you into the gritty, urban landscape of an anonymous street, a slice of real life caught in monochrome. It's a world of hard shadows and textures, a far cry from the digital perfection we're used to seeing. You can almost feel the rough paper, the way Goldberg might have coaxed the image out of the darkroom chemicals. I wonder what Goldberg was thinking when he made this? Did he see it as a record, or did he feel something more akin to the way Garry Winogrand thought of photos? Like a way to see what something looked like photographed? The woman at the center of the image isn’t posing, she’s just there, in that instant. I think of Diane Arbus and how her photos were all about seeing the world as it really is. Like, what does this one photo say about the way we live now? Goldberg is always talking to other artists, whether he knows it or not. That is the way we learn from each other, to make art that says, “Look! This is what it’s like."