"Raised by Wolves" documents the lives of teenage runaways who live on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Recorded between 1987 and 1993, Jim Goldberg was on the California streets photographing and interviewing his adolescent subjects, their social workers and the police. They all lend a distinct dimension to the harrowing picture of American urban life, and the adversarial institutional culture surrounding it.

A combination of photographs and video stills, found documents, and handwritten texts by the subjects themselves create a scrapbook of the stark and unsparing lives. At its...