Signature Drop #002: Jim Goldberg

“I have no I have no choice but to follow my intuition. I’m kind of blessed and cursed with that, so I just use it as much as I can, as best as I can.”

Jim Goldberg becomes the second artist in the new Magnum series, Signature Drop, a quarterly release of one-of-a-kind, time-limited pieces, each available for only 72 hours. Drops feature collaborations with one or more Magnum photographers to produce exclusive items like posters or prints, hand-finished with signatures, writing, or other personal touches. 

In his 2023 series Coming and Going, Goldberg chronicles more than 40 years of his life through his unique practice of collage, annotation, and montage. The autobiographical series, which he began work on in 1999, offers snippets of recognizable faces and references from his career to date alongside life-changing events like his father’s illness, getting married and divorced, the birth of his daughter, the death of loved ones, and the start of a new life — emphasizing the intimate connection between personal matters and public-facing projects. Through additions, reductions, and other alterations, Goldberg radically engages with his own biography, wielding memory as a powerful and highly versatile medium.

For Signature Drop #002, Goldberg selected two images from Coming and Going to be printed as separate 18” x 24” posters, further transforming each with tools and techniques like markers, pastels, and smudging. He said, “I wanted to choose two images that I could add to. A lot of times my process is an additive process — where I take the photograph and then I collage it, or I draw on it, or add text on it… these were images that I could do that with.

“I’m really happy that I was able to take these two and play with them in ways that I think will make them unique, unique pieces for the people who have them in their homes.”

The first poster shows an image taken during a water festival on the Fourth of July in Monte Rio, California, a town on the Russian River. A float of a sinking house was created in memory of the river flooding a year prior. The picture on top of it is a Polaroid he took in 1997 — a self- portrait, inscribed “The Last Day of Summer 1997.” He outlines the whole poster in red.

“I thought the two of them together made sense, because at that time I was going through a hard time. I was going through a divorce; my family was breaking up,” Goldberg said. “I felt it was relatable where I was, and where that flood of emotions and sinking feeling one has when something doesn’t go the way that you want.”

The second image is a collection of cut up contact sheets that Goldberg saved over the years from his project Raised by Wolves. He wasn’t sure if he should include any work from Raised by Wolves in Coming and Going since it’s not technically about him. But at the same time, he concluded, it was very much about him. Not only was it part of Goldberg’s past, but of his present too. For this image, he wanted to honor that work, the people in it, and the dreams that they and he had at the time of what it would become: Raised by Wolves.

“I cut those contact sheets up and I put them surrounding a photogram in which the words ‘my dreams’ are written in it,” explained Goldberg. “And I thought that was emblematic of all the kids, all the people involved in Raised by Wolves — the dreams and lost dreams that they had of growing up and of a better world for themselves.”

Signature Drop #002: Jim Goldberg goes live on September 20, 2024. Both hand-finished posters will be available for 72 hours only.

Video shot by Joppe Rog and edited by Roisin McAuley.