Jim Goldberg’s Coming and Going starts from a simple but unusually consequential premise: since 1999, the camera has been part of his daily life. He photographs what happens, then returns to the studio to rework those images through collage, annotation, montage, and reconstruction. Published by MACK in 2023, the book is an autobiography, but not a conventional one. It is a large-format OTA bound paperback of 360 pages, measuring 26.7 × 34 cm, and its physical scale matters to how the narrative is experienced.

Across that span, the book moves through the death of Goldberg’s parents, the birth of a child, the breakup of a marriage, and the discovery of love again. Singular and combined images sit alongside personal notes, collages, and ephemera. The result is not a tidy chronology but a volatile arrangement in which private events keep opening onto broader patterns—the comings and goings that shape a life and the ways one comes to understand it.

Goldberg’s earlier books—Rich and Poor, Raised by Wolves, Open See—established his use of sequence and narrative, and Coming and Going extends that language with particular intensity. History, memory, and imagination collide in a vividly material practice; fiction, film, and the book as a form are central to its thinking. The sequencing is not illustrative but constructive, meaning the reader encounters a life as it is repeatedly assembled, questioned, and revised.

For collectors who care about the photobook as a medium rather than a container for pictures, the book’s significance lies in this ambition. Its 360 pages, large format, and OTA bound paperback structure give the collage, annotation, and ephemera room to operate as narrative. MACK presents it as Goldberg’s masterwork and a significant contribution to contemporary bookmaking. That claim rests on the scope of the project and the rigor of its making, not on scarcity or fashion. It deserves attention as a sustained attempt to turn the materials of one life into a searching reflection on how anyone becomes legible to themselves.