The photographer who caught the heartbreak on both sides of America's social divide

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/03/jim-goldberg-rich-and-poor-photography

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Jim Goldberg describes himself as "a documentary storyteller". Often, the stories he tells are epic in scope: he spent 10 years among homeless young people in his native San Francisco for his series, Raised by Wolves. And his project Open See, which tells the stories of refugees, migrants and trafficked groups trying to find new homes in Europe (which he started in 2003 and won him the 2007 Cartier-Bresson award and the Deutsche Borse prize) still marches on.

Recently, Goldberg has been digitising his huge analog archive, a process that has prompted him to re-edit his older series with the benefit of hindsight. A reworked version of Raised By Wolves, now an expensive collector's item, is promised, but the first fruit of this process is a new version of Rich and Poor (1977-85), which has been out of print since 1985.

Rich and Poor looks at the social divide in 1970s and 80s America in Goldberg's now characteristic style – black-and-white portraits accompanied by handwritten texts from the subjects. The use of ephemera is central to his way of working. "There's a thread that runs through all the work that is to do with bearing witness," he told me in 2009. "The photographs are about asking questions, though, not answering them. I'm not a politically radical person. In fact, I'm much more interested in being radical aesthetically."

By giving his subjects a space to share their thoughts about their situation, Goldberg avoids many of the nagging questions straight photojournalism prompts: is the subject being exoticised or romanticised? Is the viewer desensitised by constant images of suffering? In Open See, many of the asylum seekers and illegal emigrants Goldberg photographed wrote short, heartbreaking paragraphs about their personal sense of displacement and longing for home.

In Rich and Poor, that sense of exile is no less acute among those struggling to survive, but theirs is an economic disenfranchisement expressed in the most poignantly personal terms. "When I look at this picture, I feel alone," writes one man of his family portrait. "My mum looks pretty I look scared," writes a young boy.

There is such pain and sadness in his portraits of the American poor, not just of those who have been physically scarred by life, but of those fatigued by the daily struggle to get by. Initially, Goldberg's approach moves between the formal portrait and the glimpsed snapshot, but becomes altogether more formal – and the pain less evident – when he enters the other country that is rich America. Here, the concerns of the sitters tend towards the individualistic.

"We are a contemporary family," writes one man, sitting on the edge of a bed with his wife and child in a minimalist bedroom. "We don't want to be part of the masses. We want to live with style." A few pages later, another man in an opulent living room with his wife writes: "I am trapped in this very consuming game where I can't have anything that is average." Between the two, one senses, lie all the myriad discontents of affluent America.

These are just some examples of the revealingly personal thoughts Goldberg teases out of his subjects by giving them the space to reflect on the photos he takes of them. Their often self-critical comments are perhaps the most surprising part of this thought-provoking book, as well as Goldberg's approach.

"We look like ordinary people!" writes one women, pictured with her arm around her child. "We have a terrible life." That exclamation mark is the crucial detail here, announcing her surprise at the trickily transformative power of photography. But it is her words, in all their rawness, that are the real revelation. It is through Goldberg's crucial creative decision to contrast one with the other that his work finds its provocative thrust.