FOREWORD
Michael Jacobs’ images are produced by a simple gesture, the dip and shift of a camera on a tripod head during the exposure of a photograph. The result is often a doubling of the image, produced solely in the camera, and at times a blurring of movement dependent on the length of the exposure. The subjects are invariably landscapes and frequently the liminal spaces within landscapes: it is the indefinable boundaries between land and sky, earth and sky that hold the photographer’s attention.
The role of technology in the production of these images is important. They are very beautiful, painterly even, and seductively decorative. But the underlying facts of a shifting tripod head and the mechanical capture of light on a chemically coated film as it passes through a calibrated lens underpin this effect. The apparatus of the camera provides a different form of evidence than the paintbrush.
In the early days of photography psychiatrists were among the first to hope the camera could provide glimpses of the world that the human eye could not perceive. Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey had shown how horses gallop and cats twist and fall through the air so it was hoped that the speed of the camera shutter could also catch infinitesimal indicators of madness that were invisible to the naked eye. They were disappointed: what the camera recorded was too ambiguous for any diagnosis or medical discovery. Likewise, spiritualists placed their hopes in photography, convinced it could reveal other dimensions beyond the material realm. Crestfallen, they turned to double exposures as a means of imitating the invisible worlds they instinctively sensed. Much later, photography fulfilled some of the promises that these early advocates had hoped for: MRI scans could document the landscape of the brain while electron microscopes and quantum photography are unearthing multi-dimensional landscapes that confound our sense of material reality.
The limits of the human senses are challenged by photography. Designed to limit both the quantity and quality of information we receive, the senses create a version of reality that allows us to function. Scientific discoveries and human instinct tell us that there are other realities. Moreover, these different kinds of knowledge enable us to understand that there is a continuous spectrum of possibilities between extremes.
In the photography of Michael Jacobs these ideas become embodied in the images. ‘Asymmetric Balance’, for instance, demonstrates a variety of perceptual possibilities within one photograph. The lack of a horizon confounds the viewers sense of scale: the dark patches of sand or seaweed in the middle of the image could be seen as a large tract of land at a distance until we view the almost solid waves above and then we try to make sense of the glassy water and precisely variegated beach in the foreground. Through the whole image we can track a muted reflection of the sun that reminds us there is a sky somewhere beyond the world of this image. We have to work as we view the image, holding more than one set of possibilities in our mind and shifting dynamically and constantly across those variables.
Similarly ‘In Darkness and in Light’ confronts us with multiple kinds of physics in one image. Most strikingly, near the center of the picture we encounter two bright orange blurred pillars of light. Eventually they reconcile themselves as images of the sun in motion that still underline why this is an image impossible to view with the human eye. It’s an image that invites deeper reflection beyond its documentation of the physical landscape. The dark grasses in the foreground contrast heavily with the natural optimism inspired by the life-giving sun. There is a melancholy cast to the scene, the sun’s intensity is in the distance while the shroud of reeds is directly in front of us. At the same time, that shroud is fragile and delicate: the sun, however, is an almost aggressive smear through that veil. Not only that but the sun (or rather the suns) defy the picturesque, painterly ‘beauty’ of the image. The mechanic operation of the camera overrides that more traditional mode of fine landscaping and so we vacillate between darkness and light, the sun and melancholy, the fine art tradition and the technology of the camera, never settling in our perception, never succumbing to one extreme or the other.
‘Persistent Fluctuation’, ‘Never-ending Pulse’ and ‘Restless Harmony’ all pursue a similar trajectory of perpetual motion. As viewers we sense the ambivalence of the images as the visual information they provide continually upsets our attempts to settle on one interpretation. On a holistic level, what is superficially a presentation of landscape photographs is also persistently destabilized by the denial of any settled judgment of what our senses perceive.
Jacobs’ cultivation of this sensual turmoil brings the viewer back to an essential questioning of role of landscape in art. Beyond the simple documentation of a view or a tract of land, what do we seek in a landscape image? The photographs in Dichotomy seem to suggest that we may look to landscape for a material depiction of our inner, less tangible, mental terrains. The exterior world can, depending on its portrayal, illuminate the complexities of our interior selves. Michael Jacobs’ dynamic, restless images reveal layered levels of our minds that shift through spectrums from light to darkness, doubt to certainty and entanglements beyond easy resolution.
In many ways Jacobs is harking back to those early pioneering photographers who hoped to document worlds beyond our senses that would make sense of the limited world we could apprehend with our eyes. The movements of the material world that we cannot see provide us with entry points to a more spiritual and nuanced reality. The unsettled, turbulent and inconstant experience of life is revealed as a truer representation of our existence than the apparently fixed certainties we often want to rely on. Diving deep beyond the beauty of these images, we discover a kinetic energy that links us inextricably to the living, mobile world around us.
Francis Mckee, Director, CCA Glasgow
