Rich and Poor
I have a book on my coffee table with the enigmatic, black-and-white portrait of a woman on the cover. The word “Rich” is plastered against the lower cheek of her face. “Poor” hangs on the back cover, just to the left of the woman and the outline of a man’s face. You can’t tell which word applies to her. Or to him.
Now out of print, Rich and Poor is a photo book by Jim Goldberg, a photographer who has been a member of the Magnum photo cooperative for several decades. It was an experiment in storytelling where he combined black-and-white photographs with written statements by his subjects about their thoughts of life and status. The project juxtaposed the residents of a welfare hotel with the upper class of San Francisco. Goldberg’s aim was to investigate what turned about to be myths of class, power, and happiness.
Goldberg’s photographs, taken over a period of eight years in the 1970s and 1980s, look crude compared to our Instagram standards. They were taken with Tri-X film, often in bad light. Harsh and grainy, they reflect the dejected souls of Goldberg’s subjects. Rich and Poor’s revelation was that this moroseness pervaded not only the residents of the Alder hotel, but likewise the upper echelons of San Francisco’s high society. The uncommon element of the work—the prose accompanying the photographs—adds a glum weight to the already depressing images.
“I can’t let go of the desires to believe in a society where things really will get better. . . . I’m less naive now, or least I hope I am. I’m confronted daily by the fact that conditions for the “Rich and the Poor” haven’t changed much since the book was first published. But I can’t let go of the desire, the impulse, to want to believe in a society where things really will get better. And, if nothing else, I hold out the hope that my photographs and all the people I met can at least still speak for themselves. ”
The remarkable fact about Rich and Poor is how Goldberg’s subjects mirror the souls of the unbelievers Paul described in Ephesus.
This I say therefore and testify in the Lord, that you henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the futility of their minds, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart. —Ephesians 4:17, 18
Goldberg originally believed that his work could effect change in the souls and minds of men. He was wrong. Only the Gospel has the power to do that.
