While death waits patiently

Volume Number 1 Issue Number 9 / November 24 -30, 2006

Gallery
While death waits patiently

Ranard’s Picture Show for Chelsea Now
Above and below, gallerygoers take in Jeff Jacobson’s photo exhibit at Peer Gallery on W. 26th St.

By John Ranard

Rapacious monsters appear and dissolve in Jeff Jacobson’s current exhibition of photographs at Peer Gallery. Light takes on a psychedelic luminance, faces appear in the sky, skeletal remains roam freely, hands are disfigured, mirrors reflect empty space and beds lie empty while death waits patiently.
The images come from the collection “Melting Point,” published by Nazraeli Press (Portland, Ore.).

Jacobson grew up in the ’50s hiding under school desks waiting for the next atom bomb that never came. Standing on the New Jersey shore 50 years later, he watched the World Trade Center turn to dust.

The photographs are structured by layer upon layer of visual information. They appear at first glance to be double exposures with pictures inside pictures, often at odds with each other. Upon closer examination, the viewer begins to decipher this information overload. Jacobson photographs through windows, making good use of mirrored images where they exist. He sometimes photographs inside museums, movie theaters and on the street. He photographs daylight with tungsten film, tungsten light with daylight film.

Pictures are in focus or out of focus. Everything takes on a weird hue.
Working within the aesthetics of documentary photography, Jacobson obeys the time-honored precepts that the photographs are not altered or manipulated. Otherwise, it would be too easy. In essence, he is a straight photographer; yet everything else is fair game to create a two-dimensional reality of the three-dimensional chaos around him.

One of the more powerful images is of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks. In the foreground stands a memorial statue commemorating the Katyn Forest Massacre near Smolensk, Russia, where Stalin ordered the execution of more than 4,000 Polish military officers in 1940. Behind the statue of the Polish soldier bayoneted in the back burn the Twin Towers. Considering all the mediocre photographs published of 9/11, it is surprising this one has remained elusive.

Kerouac wrote of Robert Frank in his introduction to “The Americans” — “You got eyes.” It becomes evident in this collection of photographs Jacobson also knows where to stand.

Jeff Jacobson, “Melting Point,” at Peer Gallery, 526 W. 26th St., Suite 208, Nov. 16 to Jan. 6.