The Langhans Gallery Prague

Bill Jacobson: funny, cry, happy  

The best-known photos by Bill Jacobson (b. 1955) are those dating from the 1990s. It is in these series of portraits and urban landscapes that he found the distinctive boundary between depiction and an abstract style of colour and light, using a ‘soft’, somewhat out-of-focus lens. Whether in the dematerialized portraits and male nudes or the pictures of New York City streets, he has employed this technique to achieve a highly emotional effect.

      At the Langhans Gallery Prague exhibition, the black-and-white photographs taken within Jacobson’s immediate milieu, made in the 1970s as a highly personal investigation into the young photographer’s environment, are shown next to the recent colour photos from his funny, cry, happy series (2004-5).

      Whereas the earlier photographs are characterized mainly by their observations of people in everyday life, the funny, cry, happy series contains fragments of architecture, products of nature, and everyday objects without human beings. Though they depict specific places and things, the composition of the photos reflects Jacobson’s experience of the abstract photographic image. The series funny, cry, happy invites the viewer to participate in the patient observation of apparently banal slices of reality, and it gradually expands his or her ability to perceive his extraordinary feel for interweaving the ordinary and the intimate spaces in which one lives.

      By placing the new series next to the early works, the curator of the exhibition, David Korecký, has sought to describe the upward curve of Jacobson’s maturation as an artist: ‘In the early photographs we perceive Jacobson’s sensitivity, but we also see how he draws on the immediate situation. In funny, cry, happy we have a mature artist who concentratedly selects trifles in which, through the medium of photography, he discovers the extraordinary sensuality.’

      Bill Jacobson recalls that when he abandoned the aesthetic of the blurry photo, viewers tended to look at his new photographs with some mistrust. Yet, he stresses, with the funny, cry, happy series he is following on from his previous work. He explains this by making a comparison to the hemispheres of the human brain, which together form a single picture of the world, while each hemisphere is to a certain extent proceeding independently.

      He describes funny, cry, happy as mental images. Korecký adds: ‘The effectiveness of the photographs is multiplied by their being placed next to each other. Their strength is in their synergy. Jacobson works sophisticatedly, delicately placing one detail next to another and in this way achieving new accents of form and content. It’s fair to say that the photos thus distance themselves from the photographed reality, and the intimacy which radiates from them originates within the relations between the photographs.’

Bill Jacobson – short biography

Bill Jacobson was born in Norwich, Connecticut. In the second half of the 1970s he took classes in photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, and in 1981 he received an MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. At present he lives and works in New York City.

After an exhibition in Seattle in 1981, his work was shown in various places in the United States from the beginning of the 1990s onwards. In 1995 he had his first European exhibition, at the Photographers’ Gallery, London. Since that time he has regularly returned to Europe. He had an exhibition at the Rupertinum Museum, Salzburg, in 1998, at the Rhodes & Mann Gallery, London, and the Zinc Gallery, Stockholm, in 2002, and at the Frac Haute-Normandie, Rouen, in 2007. In the USA he is represented by the Julie Saul Gallery, New York, and in Europe by the Milliken Gallery, Stockholm. In his hometown of New York City he has photographs in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition, his photos are also in collections of museums of art in Boston, Houston, New Orleans, St Louis, and San Francisco.

Two large Jacobson monographs were published in 1997 and 2005. The publisher, Decode Books, Seattle, is planning to publish Jacobson’s latest book this year.