Jim Goldberg

Among all the endless and rich possibilities of photographic storytelling, there are few projects that have risen to match the depth and poeticism of Magnum photographer Jim Goldberg’s iconic body of work, Raised by Wolves. Long known as an innovator of narrative form, Goldberg has spent decades expanding the canon of documentary tradition, deftly combining image and text in unexpected ways and forging new potentials for complex, nuanced understandings of others.

Supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Goldberg began Raised by Wolves in the mid 80s and spent a decade photographing the lives of homeless youths in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Beginning by entering into communities of kids living in the streets, Goldberg forged close relationships with his subjects, making friends and intertwining himself into their lives. Such a commitment goes beyond the simple act of image-making, and enters into a far rarer integration between subject and author that Goldberg forged to unlock depths of intimacy rarely found in pictures alone.

In Raised by Wolves, Goldberg expresses narrative in multiplicities, combining his own original images with home movie stills, drawings, discarded belongings, snapshots, maps, contact sheets collage, and other visual ephemera. The work spans the chasm of fact and fiction, and includes a sprawling cast of characters who often contribute their own handwritten notes atop the images Goldberg makes of them. The resulting collection, and what many consider to be Goldberg’s Magnum Opus, is a collaborative diary of degeneracy, struggle, addiction, and hope; and one in which the photographer asks his subjects to co-write with him as a radical re-consideration of visual storytelling. Today, nearly 30 years since the first public introduction of Raised by Wolves, Goldberg’s widely acclaimed approach to photographic authorship remains a distinct and significant benchmark in the legacies of photographic documentary.