In March 2013, Jim Goldberg spent a week traveling through Haiti, making Polaroids and listening. The photographs gathered in Polaroids from Haiti record people negotiating daily life in a country where, as the publisher puts it, the 2010 earthquake still reverberates from every surface. Goldberg calls himself a documentary storyteller, and the phrase fits a practice built on proximity and conversation rather than distance. The instant format matters here: each image is a unique object, exchanged or kept, and that intimacy shapes how the Haitians in these pages appear before the camera.

Issued as number 84 in Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book series, the volume is a hardcover of 16 pages with 11 four-color plates and one original Polaroid, signed by Goldberg. The structure is deliberately spare. In a series defined by the pairing of reproduced images with a physical photographic print, the book operates as both a reading object and a small archive, and the inclusion of an original work shifts the register from documentation to something closer to a kept token.

The photographs were made three years after the earthquake, and they resist the disaster imagery that tends to define outside attention on Haiti. Instead, Goldberg’s subjects are shown in the middle of ordinary struggles and ordinary continuities, an emphasis the publisher describes as reflecting both continuing challenges and an undying spirit. That framing is not sentimentality; it is a claim about endurance, and it aligns the book with Goldberg’s long-standing interest in how people narrate their own circumstances.

For collectors, the book’s interest lies in its place within a distinguished series and in the way it condenses a larger project into a compact form. The combination of a limited sequence of plates with a signed original Polaroid makes it a concentrated example of Goldberg’s documentary method, and a considered addition for anyone following the One Picture Book series or the photographer’s work.