Driving through upstate New York's Catskill mountains in spring, past Kingston, you are surrounded by a variation of greens provided by the different trees and bushes scattered around. In the gardens of charming hill side houses people clean the last branches, take out the summer furniture, light a barbecue here and there. On my way to Woodstock, a typical hippie village upstate,not to be confused with the famous festival that took place on a nearby farmland in the sixties. Woodstock is full of new age stores, Dharma bums and people wearing peace sign shirts. Keeping that revolutionary spirit alive for sure, "you know what I'm sayin?"
I'm in upstate New York for three months now and always scan the local newspapers for various activities in the small towns Red Hook, Rhinebeck, Tivoli and such. In the Almanac Weekly I came across an announcement on Jeff Jacobson's show at the Center for Photography.
The exhibition is titled “The last roll”, Jacobson's farewell to his beloved Kodachrome film that Kodak stopped producing some years ago.
Dreamlike, dark, vague
Twelve pictures are put up in the gallery, all shot in the Catskill area around his house when Jacobson was recovering from the chemotherapy he underwent to fight lymphoma in 2005. The photo's are dreamlike, dark, vague. A dog facing left in the snow shot through a window frame, a black figure in the blueish light of a winter evening. The dog seems to anticipate something, someone entering the driveway? Another picture: A girl in a wooden chair on a lawn, Anne Frank like posture, staring at her knees, reading, drawing, writing? Actually, you don't really want to know. I could ask Jacobson, who's standing right next to me, but I don't want to, I want to keep my impression to myself, intact. Or dream away in front of another photo: a deer shot from a car, running past the road. Imagine myself standing between the hills full of broken white trees in another frame. David Lynch's Blue Velvet, that's the eerie feeling I get watching these prints.
There's two photo's that seem double exposed. One is a kid on a climbing wall covered with what seems are rhododendrons, the climbing wall itself is overshadowed by a yellow sail, a roof like structure. The other, bigger print, is divided into the in- and exterior of a motel. On the inside a bed with a colored blanked over it, on the outside a snowy street with a parked pickup truck and a figure walking past. Because of the black color of the figure and the moment it is frozen in time I immediately think of the famous picture of a Big Foot. I ask Jacobson if these are double exposed, but he answers that they're both taken trough a window, reflecting in and outside. I later learn, during the artist talk, that he never uses photoshop or other “modern” tricks.
The longer it takes before you see what you shoot, the better it is
The cherry on the pie during my visit: Jacobson being interviewed by his son, filmmaker Henry Jacobson. Throughout the talk, during which the main room of the Center gets very crowded, his son flips through slides of his dad's work, commenting and contemplating on the photo's seen at the large projector screen. Jacobson starts by telling he grew up as a jewish kid in Ohio. So he was a insider in his own community but, being Jewish, an outsider in Ohio itself. After a career in law he started to work for various magazines such as Life, Fortune, NYT magazine. According to Jacobson some editors really kept him alive with the jobs they gave him and therefor supported him in doing his own, more artistic work, as well.
The talk lingers beautifully between personal en professional life, with Jacobson telling about his feelings as a father. Life is not so simple anymore when you become a parent, he says. After his best friend and dad dies he decides to move to Los Angeles with his son and feels very lonely there. During this part of the talk he shows one of his favorite pictures: His dad with small Henry in his arms, standing in the ocean, cheerfully and brave; two generations clung together.
On a technical note Jacobson explains his earlier problems with digital photography. Taking digital photo's, the time between the shot and seeing the result is very short. Jacobson believes that the longer it takes before you see what you shoot, the better it is because you cannot clearly remember anymore what the situation was when you took it.
After his chemo Jacobson decided to stop doing commissioned work. His concern about the wellbeing of the planet and the freedom to photograph whatever he likes, after shooting around the world, became his main goal. His work was also so intertwined with the Kodachrome films that he used, so canceling the film production was like an artistic passing away to him. After facing physical mortality in 2004, three years later he had to let go off the professional material he worked with for decades as well. But Jacobson is over that now and it felt as a relief to let go and he started shooting with a Leica 10 mega pixel camera....
Jacobson photo's are beautifully simple, mysterious and leave the spectator with an unearthly feeling of time standing still and passing by at the same time. If you happen to visit the upstate region of New York state, make sure you pay a visit to the Center for Photography at Woodstock, for current exhibitions check: http://www.cpw.org/