For ten years Jim Goldberg worked closely with and documented runaway teenagers in the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. He expanded upon a style of documentary photography using original photographs, text and a variety of other elements such as home-movie stills, family snapshots, drawings, diary entries and discarded belongings. Goldberg’s work tells profoundly human stories, looking at the beauty and complexity of human life that persists, despite pervasive forms of social and spiritual poverty. This oeuvre documents the complex ways that people struggle to affirm their dignity and integrity when social circumstance, time and situation work against them. Indeed, the life and death of Tweeky Dave, the protagonist of this work, seem to be a metaphor for the inevitable decline of a society which offers to its youth no other ideal or religion than the act of consuming.