Jim Goldberg’s new book, Coming and Going, is a mess. It’s a mess of photographs, a mess of handwritten text, of notes, letters, a mess of collages of photographs often hundreds of images to a page, a mess of people I have no idea who they are, a mess of little details related to the page in ways that only Jim knows. The book is a mess from its front cover, throughout its three hundred and sixty thick pages (that’s what Amazon says, I didn’t count), to its back cover, a mess of family and family and feelings and family and life that goes on and on.

It’s quite possible that Jim Goldberg isn’t even a photographer, though the book has more photographs (if you count every tiny collage element as a photograph) than you can doomscroll on Instagram in a day of trying. It’s all photographs, more or less, that is true, but none of them are photographs in the usual artistic sense, in any professional sense. They are scrapbook images, or fragments of scrapbook images, and the scrapbook is thorough and often odd and inventive and probably (as probably intended) more akin to your own memory’s structure than to any framed print on the wall.

There’s a story being told in these pages, in this mess of photographs, and there is a structure. There is no doubt about it—the book includes sections and chapter headings and narrative voiceovers and a distinct arc of events. I could share the summary with you, I could lay it out, but it wouldn’t really be a summary. The story is so straightforward, so short to put into words, that any summary would unavoidably be the story itself in its entirety. And the thing is, the story it tells is just the story we all already know from our own existence. It’s the story of a person’s life, the ups and the downs, the good things and the bad, shared by a person who may not be articulate with words, who may not create pretty metaphorical images of deep meaning for display on some museum’s walls, but who sees and feels and shares and there it is.

Going through the book I couldn’t help but think of my own father (you will think of yours, too) who died in April 2020, just as the pandemic really got going and how he used to write on photographs, to physically write upon them, in a way that echoes Goldberg and how I thought (and said) then that he was ruining the photographs (I said “ruining” but as a young photographer I thought “desecrating”) and my dad kept photo album after photo album of these photographs. I thought of my own wife, of the long path of marriage, of my two children, my two girls, of the years as they grew from babies to kids to teenagers to leaving home to moving far away. I thought of my mother, still alive and going strong, who lives in Ohio and I thought of all of this while I was thinking of Jim’s story, the flow of what Jim was trying to do interrupted and side-railed and all messed in with my own story and maybe I should try to get through the book yet again without losing focus and then, as I’m writing this, I realize that it really doesn’t matter because it’s all the same story anyway.

A few years ago they reissued one of Goldberg’s earlier books, Rich and Poor, and I bought one for everyone on my Christmas list, I bought a copy for people without the slightest interest in art or serious photography, I bought copies for my siblings and, I think, my dad. I wish I had bought more. But I won’t be buying copies of Coming and Going this Christmas. The book is too messy for most people, and I think, I suspect, it really isn’t a book that Jim made with me (or anyone on my Christmas list) in mind. I don’t think (this is my heartfelt best guess) that he really had anyone in mind for the audience when he made it other than himself and maybe his family. I think we are just looking over his shoulder, so to speak, peaking at his personal photo album, invited in but not really given much more than the cursory tour, so much of the imagery that clogs the pages unknown in provenance and in intent.

The right way to approach the book is as something you found in a dusty old house, maybe your own father’s house after the funeral, rather than as something that was made for you. The story you already know but open the book and try to decipher the unfamiliar mysteries along with the familiar faces, wonder at all that feeling, all of that emotion, almost embarrassingly personal, which you knew must have been there all along (but you know this only in hindsight) but life was too busy, too messy, to know any of it in any real way at the time. And wonder then at your own story, at your own coming and going, and it’s a mess, too, and this book brings all of this to the surface and I don’t know what to do anymore and so much time has gone by.

Photography as a serious art form is in a difficult place. There are more photobooks made now than ever before, a book expected by every photographer for every body of work, books paid for moreso than earned. There are too many photobooks, too many to count let alone buy, too many to buy let alone read, too many to read let alone feel. Charge cards are maxed out, trust funds are drained, and yet photobooks continue to flow out of publishers, so many little publishers, so many book designers, so many reverse subventions, and the books get more and more beautiful but matter less and less and less. We are people who can afford expensive photobooks making photobooks for others who can afford expensive photobooks. We are our own 1%.

Jim Goldberg’s new book is not beautiful, not even pretty. It is so very different from anything else that I’m not really sure it’s a photobook, just as I’ve said I’m not sure if Goldberg is a photographer. I don’t know what it is but I do know it is hard to get through, emotionally hard to get through, and hard to think about for the same reason. I don’t want to look at most other photobooks, after having gone through them once or twice, because there is so little there, so little that is true and honest and real. Coming and Going suffers the opposite fate. It is too true and too honest and too real and it makes me sad and it makes me wistful and it makes me reminiscent and it makes me consider what really matters when so little really does.