Last Son

"The Last Son" is Jim Goldberg's autobiographical assemblage of visual memories from his childhood in New Haven, Connecticut. It turns his documentary eye on his own family rather than on the strangers and subjects of his earlier projects.

Goldberg, the youngest son of a wholesale candy distributor, traces his own dreams alongside his father's as he moves through the past in photographic and written montage. He mixes family photographs, collage, handwritten text, and stills from home movies, building the narrative from his archive rather than in strict chronological order. SUPER LABO published this first edition in Kanagawa, Japan, in 2016: a 134-page hardcover with dust jacket, printed in full color offset and holding 85 images, with the title also given in Japanese. It is the second book in a personal three-part series for the publisher, following his zine "134 Ways to Forget" (SUPER LABO, 2011); the project's conceptual starting point was his own reworking of "Rich and Poor" (Steidl, 2014).

Goldberg was born in 1953. The series' planned third volume was to draw on previously unpublished photographs he made while traveling in Asia in the 1970s. His work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among other institutions.