Bill Jacobson at Julie Saul

Eleven photographs were upon view in this show: half a dozen are head discharges three are images of water, single shows a single hand and individual a seated, naked body. All are titled meditation Series, and all are gelatin silver prints. The range of tones is narrow and the passage from light to shadow surpassingly subtle; there are none of the sun-struck bleached whites that have appeared in Jacobson's previous prints, nor does he reach for blacks. These photographs do retain the impressible focus that has characterized his work to date, on the other hand their closest affinity is with paintings; Gerhard Richter's photo-based portraits of dead nourishs and German terrorists in particular tend hitherward to mind.

abundant of the currently prevalent shot-from-the-hip photography, obliquely framed, loosely focused and indifferently expos is meant to deemphasize its makers' technical mastery, affecting a kind of visual awkward fellow There is nothing of the slacker about Jacobson's novel work. Instead, it seems literally polished, buff-skined to a dull sheen that is painterly in the tradition of Academic canvases' licked finishes. If les animated than a certain number of contemporary photography, it is more intent.

There is, indeed, a hint of the heroic in the gaunt, Gallic, vaguely Duchampian profile shown in single photograph, and an innocent earnestness in the straight-on portrait of a youthful man. individual alert young sitter gazes thoughtfully if a little stagily, to his left; another eyeballs the viewer with a determined mournful stare. All the images are tightly cropp in single case so radically that sole chin and mouth make the make an incision in In the water shots, tight framing arises in limited expanses of rippled sea that are without shoreline or horizon. Again, a painter tend hitherwards to mind, Vija Celmins, whose images of water and celestial expanse seem close in spirit to the preternaturally still, almost stony (as in polished granite) surfaces that Jacobson attains. The vertical orientation of his water images further weakens the connection with natural bodies of water and their earthbound, lateral flow

These unable to speak seascapes are the first of Jacobson's photographs to depart from the human control But they were interspersed with the other photographs here in a carefully paced, linear following that reintroduced a measure of the narrative complexity that marked a certain quantity of of Jacobson's previous work. notwithstanding that figure groups and social situations are dispensed with, the relationships between individual twinklings in this series--the passage from meditative face to watery of great depth to the lone dangling arms--are richly theatrical.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group