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Seeing
the Difference
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Session One: Silence, Art and Ritual Jim
Goldberg In the 1980s I received a Public Art Commission to do work in a nursing home in Cambridge, Massachusetts--I was teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and I received this commission to do a permanent installation there. I spent about four months at the nursing home before I even photographed. My work is based in trust. And I don't work well just snapping pictures, although some people would say the opposite. I really feel like intimacy and trust are the guide to my work. So I used the methodology [I had used in an earlier book] of having people write on the photographs, and I extended it by using sound, smells, objects, etc., all different sizes of photographs. I don't know if you can read the writing, but I'll read it for you. This work was not a condemnation of the nursing home industry. If anything, it was about a situation that I found myself in, photographing people who are sometimes forgotten, sometimes not, but were there for various reasons. And, really, the work is about dying, and then accepting your death. Here, then, are some of the inscriptions written by the individuals in the photographs. A woman named Margaret writes: Dear Jim, I wish there was some concoction to drink so that you and I wouldn't get old. This picture is about getting old, the camera doesn't lie. This is what pain and sickness will do to you. It is a disappointment. I cannot believe I look like this. I would like to see a picture of you close-up when youŐre 76 years old. --Margaret 1 Margaret's belief that the camera does not lie is not shared by the man who writes of this photo, where he appears with another resident2: Another man, photographed lying inert in his bed, positions himself as not really in the "world": I was handsome. I had a stroke. I lie here all day long listening to voices squeaking. I'm fed up with my ailments. I'm through with this world. I want to go to a happy place. And Mary seems to have trouble recognizing herself 3: We can juxtapose Mary's uncertainty in identifying herself--"I think this is me"--to another woman's noting of her photograph, "This is a big picture, I like it. I'm hidden away. I'm all gone." But a more optimistic note is sounded by the man of ninety-nine who wrote: Some old people are absolutely useless, but I'm hanging on very well. I'm going to be 99. It's all a struggle. When I go to sleep I'm never sure if I will wake up. I'm slipping between darkness and lightness. . . . I look pretty good, except I'm bald-headed. But I want to turn now to my father. In 1992, at my father's seventy-fifth birthday party, which was basically a family reunion, we got together in Florida where my parents lived, and had a little celebration. But we also had a family discussion. My father, before I was born, was diagnosed with a disease that is very rare but is like MS. And the story goes that when my mother was pregnant with my sister--I have two other siblings, I'm the youngest--and my father was drafted for World War II and took his physical, they found out that he had this disease. He had no idea. He was having trouble walking or something like that. They gave him a 4F draft rating and told him that he had up to a year to live. This story is very important to understanding my Hospice photographs, because this is a man who was supposed to die and then he went out and had two other children and lived a full life, dying only at age seventy-six. But it wasn't an easy life. He did struggle and never felt that he could reach his potential. He had that disease which continually disabled him. And then he was diagnosed--I'm not even sure when, but in the 1980s--with colon cancer. It was taken out, but within the five years, the cancer came up again, and this time in his lungs. And so when we met as a family on that day, on his birthday, it was getting harder and harder for him to get out of the chair because of his serena myalia, but also because of his debilitation from the the cancer. It just was getting to be too much. And we decided as a family that Hospice was the way to go. And at the same time, at the exact same time--this is a long story, I'm sorry--I got a call from the National Hospice Association, to see if I would be interested in a commission to photograph the hospice experience. Well, I had just done Raised by Wolves, a book on street kids. I had had enough of this negative stuff, and wanted to do something happier. But I had to admit that at least what they offered me at the time was pretty good money, and it seemed that I had no choice. I was broke from Raised by Wolves. But still I really didn't want to do it, and I was really debating it. But when we met as a family, it just seemed a bittersweet blessing, that I was given this opportunity to photograph. And since I lived in California, I'd be paid to travel to Florida to do the work. And my family thought it was a good idea because they felt that this project could help people, and they wanted to help people. So I spent a year photographing my father in the dying process. Recently my mom died, very unexpectedly. It shouldn't have happened--you can understand the anger, frustration, shock, right now, that this death incurred. She also was diagnosed with colon cancer, and she was fine--they removed the cancer. But she was on chemotherapy and she got dehydrated. And she was old enough to be of the generation that didn't necessarily ask questions of the doctor. So she basically accepted it and thought that she was sick, that there's nothing you can do, and chemo does make you sick. She got dehydrated, and as she started getting better, she had a heart attack and died. Thus, my newest work, which I don't have today, will be about her death, combining it with this. What I hope to do is work on a new book that's about Hospice, my daughter growing up, my own divorce, and then my mother dying--about things falling apart and things coming together again. So that's the context of how I'm showing this work today.
It would be bad politics for me to say the work is not really about Hospice. I went out of my way not to make any kind of propagandistic work about Hospice because I felt that it spoke for itself, by the fact that it allowed our family to be a family together, and allowed me to photograph. But really, this work is about birth and death, and my relationship with my dad. I had my mother keep diaries. I kept a diary, too. A lot of my work revolves around my writing now. I'm getting to be a better writer as I get older. Let me read you something, if I may indulge myself. I got the call before Christmas that my father was going downhill. Hospice thought he was going to make it for a while longer. My mother said no. So I went there. And my father died on Christmas Day of 1993. Because of that, everyone from Hospice was on vacation. So we had to get outside help to come in. On December 25 at 6:30 a.m., this is what I wrote:
Notes 1 The italicized quotes are from inscriptions written on the photographs by the photographic subjects. Other quotes are from Jim Goldberg directly. 2 John inscribes his photograph with these comments: We look like we are friends. I never talk to him. We have nothing in common. There is nothing to say. We aren't like the picture. --John Mason 3 Mary writes on her photo: I was such a pretty mother. I was beautiful when I was young. Now I've changed. I think this is me. I don't know. --Mary, 81 years old.
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