Bill Jacobson: 1989-1997

A survey of the nine years in which Bill Jacobson (b. 1955) made his signature out-of-focus photographs, images conceived amid the AIDS crisis as meditations on desire, loss, and photography's role as a vehicle for remembrance.

Published by Twin Palms in 1998, the book gathers 49 tritone plates spanning the bodies of work Jacobson produced between 1989 and 1997: the pale, spectral Interim portraits, figures, couples, and landscapes the darker Song of Sentient Beings series, in which defocused figures emerge from deep black grounds and the nearly monochromatic Thought Series linking the human figure to nature. Deliberately unresolved, the pictures function, in Jacobson's words, as metaphors for the way the mind works, collecting some images while letting others go, fading as memories and photographs themselves fade. The volume includes "Lost Profile," a short story written for the book by the critic and curator Klaus Kertess, and was printed in tritone on heavy coated stock by EBS in Verona.

Born in Norwich, Connecticut, and trained at Brown University and the San Francisco Art Institute, Jacobson began blurring his lens in 1989 as the epidemic's losses mounted, and this volume remains the definitive record of that first decade. His photographs are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and his later series, from New Year's Day to A Series of Human Decisions and Lines in My Eyes, turned the same searching attention toward color, place, and focus itself.