Hangzhou & Shanghai, China 2014

Hangzhou & Shanghai China 2014 from Quinn Jacobson on Vimeo.

Defining Personal Vision In Photography

Photography is to seeing as poetry is to writing.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about personal vision as it applies to photography. 

I think it was Chuck Close that said photography is the most difficult craft to have a distinct, personal vision (paraphrasing). Few truer words have ever been spoken. Photography is ubiquitous, easy to copy or emulate, and influence is incessant. It’s almost impossible to say that you’re doing something original in photography. However, I believe that you can find your vision to say or ask something new within that framework.

John "Nemo" Nemerovski - Whole Plate Alumitype - August 2012For those of you that have read what I’ve written in the past, or have heard a lecture or a talk about my work, you know that I’m a firm believer in context and intention. In other words, if you have context and intention for your work, you’ve started the journey on defining a personal photographic vision or style. 

There are no hard and fast rules, no gospel, if you will, about all of this. It’s simply opinion. Some opinions ring more true or valid than others for me. I believe that if you begin with context and intention, meaning you’ve done the intellectual work for the images, and you’ve found a deep well to draw from, you are well on your way to articulating what’s important, meaningful or serious about your work. Along with that, you’re defining your personal vision. 

When I started making images for my project, “Portraits from Madison Avenue”, I had already explored a lot of the questions that drove the work. What I didn’t realize is that what I was doing was defining why I make photographs, or defining my personal, distinct vision – both aesthetically and intellectually. My work on that project began many, many years ago (1980s). One of the reasons I never fully articulated what the work was about rested in the aesthetics. It was Wet Collodion that gave me the visual building blocks and metaphors to dig deep in the project and fully bring the ideas and aesthetics to the public in a real way.

I had, from the beginning, wanted to achieve four things with my portraiture work. The first thing was to create portraits that were “temporally confusing”. That means photographs that are timeless, or blur the line between historical and contemporary imagery. I wanted to infuse the idea of memory, or my memories and questions, into the images through the aesthetic. The second thing was to create photographs that were “ghostly”, or disturbing and attractive all at once. I wanted the viewer to feel the presence of the sitter in the photograph. The third requirement was to create photographs that had a unique signature through the use of very shallow depth of field, anathema to the 19th Century aesthetic, and unique lighting – a Caravaggio aesthetic – if you will.  And the last item, but not the least in any sense, was the person I photographed. I only photographed people with a unique (sometimes very subtle) look and an interesting story. All of these elements came together with the Wet Collodion process and I pursued it with everything I had. 

It was somewhere between 2005 and 2006, that I first saw work similar to mine begin to appear online. At that time, I was almost finished with the project. I had the first exhibition of the work in March, 2006. People started asking me if it upset me. It did. It wasn’t because I had a copyright on the look and feel I was using, but because I knew the work I was seeing lacked personal (distinct) vision. They hadn’t done their intellectual work; there was no context or intention. They were simply copying an aesthetic to use to make portraits that looked “cool”. This was the beginning of what has turned into hundreds and hundreds of portraits that look like my style; there’s a plethora of photographers making portraits very similar to mine today. Every once in a while I’ll get an email with an attachment asking me about how I made the portrait (attached in the email) and it’s not my photograph. So now, my work gets in the long line of the “Collodion Mug Shots”. And if you don’t take the time to read about my work (my statements) and how I’ve defined my personal vision, I get lost in the shuffle. 

I completely agree with Chuck Close. It's very difficult to define a personal style or vision in photography. If/When you do, I suggest you defend that vision. Make sure people understand that you have context and intention with the work, and that you’ve done the intellectual work. In other words, stand your ground, be proud of what you’ve done. So few can really do it.

Spanish Magazine Features My Work

If there's one constant in life and art, it's change. And I'm learning to embrace it.

After some serious soul searching, I've come to the conclusion that my work falls under one main idea - one thought - “the other”. I can't distinguish any longer between a portrait of a mentally challenged trash man in Utah or an image of a smokestack next to a (former) concentration camp in Germany. The theme and ideas are the same to me now.

To my mind, my work is about difference (I often refer to this as, "the other") and memory. It's an investigation about how we see each other and what that means in our daily lives. The memory is both personal and universal - do we learn anything from the past, or is it something we ignore and/or deny? I want my work to question self-consciousness, too. I request that the viewer think about themselves from the inside out, not outside in - a unexamined life...

I heard a comment about the words, "equal" and "the same", last night on the radio. It was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so it was a good time to reflect on equality, difference, and sameness.

I came to realize that I don't want everyone to be the same, but I want equality. In a perfect world, we would all be equal (rights, respect, etc.) and we would embrace one another's differences. That's in a perfect world. I suppose that's what I try to do. In a circuitous way, I try to celebrate the differences between us. I enjoy a unique face as much, or more, than a "beautiful" face, etc. etc.

I am infinitely infatuated with difference (in a good way). I think I equate difference/uniqueness with awareness somehow. I don't mean that in the sense of trends or fads, but in the sense of being who you are, fully aware of that (internally) and letting the world deal with it - not the other way around.Excerpt from 1:1's website - "War Damage".

That brings me to the intent of my blog; a Spanish online magazine called, "1:1Foto Magazine" out of Madrid has featured some of my work in this issue. You can see it here or click on the image to go to the site. They are a great group of people and actually understand what I'm doing and have done. Muchas gracias!

I'm very happy to be making work, thinking, dreaming and living more as an artist now. I will continue to work toward being more self-aware and not being disconcerted about being who I am. And I'll continue to make work in that context with the hope of teaching myself, and others, tolerance.

Thomas Huxley said, "Try to learn something about everything and everything about something."

Self Portrait: Collodion & DNA

I have a couple of really important goals that I want to accomplish in the next few months. One of them is to make work for my project, exhibition and book.

I thought I would get creative with my time and my commitments. We are leaving Thursday for ten days and wanted to post the October Video Podcast on Chemical Pictures before we left. I also had an image in mind that I've wanted to make for a few weeks. I thought, why not make a few plates, create an image for my project and cover the podcast, too? So that's what I did today.

These image are about numbers, labeling, skulls & sockets, history, evilness, genetics and otherness. I distressed plate #3 a little bit. I varnished it shortly after making this copy and it cleaned up quite a bit - I was a little disappointed about that but I still like the image. I look so different in each image, it trips me out a wee bit.

It took four plates to get two that I really like.

"Self Portrait #3 - Jewish DNA" - 8"x10" Alumitype - Viernheim, Germany 2009 
Self Portrait #1 With Y-DNA Sequence Backwards (written by hand)

August 2009 Video Podcast

For my Collodionista brothers and sisters that are signed up for my Chemical Pictures Workshop: The August 2009 Video Podcast is online - you can find it here.

Comparing Varnishes - Old & New