THIS MUST BE THE PLACE
PHOTOGRAPHER BILL JACOBSON
On any given day the world reveals itself / a series of human decisions / suddenly seen or made / in focus or not. — from “A Certain Slant” by Maureen N. McLane
With their sharp focus and minimalist composition, Bill Jacobson’s recent photographs might seem like an about-face from the indistinct, out-of-focus images on which he established his career. In some ways, his newer work does represent a departure, but there are correspondences. In Lines in My Eyes, a series of sharply defined images of linear forms and planes in dialogue with one another, many of the photographs are of architectural details or of placed objects within interior and exterior settings. In Lines in My Eyes #194, for instance, the top half of a doorway reveals a room beyond it. Inside the room, one can glimpse a corner of a white rectangular shape, most of it out of the line of sight. An interplay between the seen and unseen is suggested. In older bodies of work, such as his New Year’s Day series from 2002, where the details of landscapes, cityscapes, and figurative portraits are obscured, a similar exchange between the visible and the barely discerned also exists. “My earlier work had a lot to do with remembrance, with perception, with how the brain takes in images and lets go of images over time,” Jacobson told
Pasatiempo. “Essentially, there were no right angles in that work, because when you soften an image to the degree that I did, it basically rounds everything out. That indistinction was, for me, a parallel with how the mind remembers information, often in such distinct ways — but more often in such impressionistic ways.”
Photographs from two bodies of Jacobson’s works are on exhibit starting Friday, Nov. 27, at James Kelly Contemporary. The show, called Lines in My Eyes, contains images from that series as well as from a more recent project, Place (Series). There is some overlap. Both are concerned with geometry and with the placement of objects, typically rectangles, within an environment, natural or constructed. Jacobson had a cathartic experience in 2005 that led to an interest in exploring the more defined work that eventually resulted in these two series. After a move from the East Village to Brooklyn, he picked up and handled every object he had amassed over the years of living in his Manhattan loft. “It really started me thinking about the physicality of space and the physicality of objects,” he said. “Space and objects are also things we perceive constantly. They’re also traces of how people go through the world, much in the same way that the outof-focus work also represented a trace of life. I started thinking about the rectangle as an archetype, because it’s basically the basis for the constructed world.”
In Lines in My Eyes #193, a door at the right of the picture invites eye movement from left to right and a curiosity about what lies beyond that door. A light is coming through from the unseen room, reflecting off a corner wall to the left, an incandescent counterpart to the solidity of the door opposite it. The image describes a defined interior space and is bisected by a vertical line near the middle of the composition. It’s the junction where two walls meet, dividing the image into separate planes. Jacobson explained, “Another body of work that also speaks to this is one called A Series of
Human Decisions. That was the first series where I had to essentially learn how to make an in-focus picture, having not done it from about 1989 to 2005, except for some commercial work. I really had to start thinking about what it meant to see the world in focus after a long hiatus. The thing I came away with studying those pictures was this line of division that separates planes in space, that separates objects from background, or defines architecture or objects.”
Jacobson’s Place (Series) is also the subject of a new monograph published by Radius Books. The book was devised with a simple, minimal design that reflects the images within it. “The premise of the book is that we’re always placing. It’s really the way we make and build the world around us, whether it’s placing furniture or an architect placing a window in a certain position within a building façade, or where we place a book on a table. We’re constantly placing things, and that’s essentially how the world gets made.”
There are no expository essays, introductions, or forewords in the book. But there is a poem by Maureen N. McLane written in response to Jacobson’s work. “Maureen is a poet I’ve been friends with for a very long time,” he said. “She knows my work and my process fairly intimately, and she wanted to do a piece for the book that was really a reflection on this body of work, suggesting its interaction with earlier photographs. It’s how she sees it from her own vantage point.”
For the Place (Series) photos, Jacobson staged simple interventions in natural and urban environments. By placing large white rectangles in various outdoor sites, he introduces an architectural element at odds with its surroundings. “Any building is really a series of rectangles in what had once been a natural, unbuilt environment,” he said. “We’re always witnessing that odd contradiction between the asymmetry of nature and the symmetry and geometry of the constructed world, whether it’s a tree in the middle of a lighted urban environment or a house that sits out in the most beautiful wooded environment. There’s always that contradiction and that odd join between two different formal concerns.”
Jacobson sometimes stacks and arranges rectangular cutouts as though they were the reductive forms of a still life. “I feel like I am a still-life photographer, even when organizing shapes in the color landscapes or the way I would position the body in my Interim Portraits,” he said. The
Interim Portraits, made between 2002 and 2003, are intended not as portraits of individual people or personalities but as bodies, physical objects within a frame. “If I come from any tradition in photography, the one I align most closely with is still life.”
But the rectangle is a solid plane that, once placed, obscures what lies immediately behind it. This is used to intriguing effect in Jacobson’s photography. In Place (Series) #840, for example, a person holds one such rectangular board in front of his or her body, standing on a city street. The background is out of focus, but the rectangle is not. The rectangle, the most distinct feature of the image, is also its most direct and uncomplicated. The figure holding the rectangle is mostly obscured; only a pair of legs peeking out from beneath its bottom edge is visible. “That’s one of the real overlaps with the earlier work. The rectangle also tends to hide or obscure information. One of the things I’ve tried to do over the years is to present an image where there’s an absence as well as a presence. It forces the viewer to make the link between the two.”
details
▼ Bill Jacobson: Lines in My Eyes ▼ Reception 5 p.m. Friday, Nov. 27; exhibit through Jan. 9, 2016 ▼ James Kelly Contemporary, 1611 Paseo de Peralta, 505-989-1601