Quinn Jacobson (American, b. 1964), an artist versed in mixed media encompassing photography, painting, and sculpture, obtained his M.F.A.I.A. (Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts) from Goddard College in Vermont. His creative journey delves into the intricacies of human behavior, notably the themes of death denial, death anxiety, and terror management theory. Drawing from a diverse array of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, anthropology, theology, and history, Quinn scrutinizes how humanity grapples with the existential awareness of mortality and the subsequent behaviors it engenders through his art. In other words, he’s addressing the question of how humans cope with the awareness of their own deaths.

He's published four books on historic photographic processes. He works with calotypes (paper negatives) and both wet and dry collodion processes. He specializes in several different printing-out processes (POP), including platinum palladium, kallitype (Nicol’s K1), Rawlins Oil, cyanotypes, photogenic drawings, and various siderotype processes. He also works with the RA-4 reversal process. These are color prints made in camera (direct positives). He also works in acrylic, oil, and collage (mixed media). Painting both abstract and non-objective work.

Since September 2021, he’s been working on a new project, “In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of Othering and the Origins of Evil.” In this work, he addresses humanity's history of genocide and ethnocide through Ernest Becker’s theories on human behavior and mortality awareness (death anxiety). He is also addressing Terror Management Theory (TMT) and how it applies to what happened to the Tabeguache-Ute in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, where he lives now.

Quinn hopes to publish a book of this work sometime in 2025. You can stay current on what he’s doing through his blog.

ABOUT QUINN

Photography was a part of Quinn's life from an early age. Both his mother and father were avid photographers. And both accomplished in their own right. 35mm still film, Polaroid film, and 8mm movie film were typical in the Jacobson house. Every event was documented. Photography was vital to his family.

He began his career as a photographer in the United States military in 1982. In 1993, he received a Bachelor of Integrated Studies degree (B.I.S.) in Photography, Visual Art, and Communication from Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, USA. In 2007, he received a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Art, (MFAIA) with an emphasis on 19th-century photography from Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont, USA.

QUINN’S STORY

The turn of the century (2000) changed Quinn's photographic career. After searching for several years for a way to connect to his work and have a deeper understanding of it, he discovered the Wet Plate Collodion process. There are two Collodion images responsible for his entry into the Collodion world. The first was by an anonymous photographer from the 19th century, and the second was by one of Frederick Scott Archer's protégé, Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond.

He was browsing a book by John Szarkowski called, "Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art", and stumbled across a small, anonymous Ambrotype and immediately knew he'd found what he was looking for. During his research, he learned about Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond. One of Diamond's portraits, "Woman With Dead Bird", set the stage for Quinn's work. He was familiar with Albumen printing (POP) from his undergraduate studies almost a decade earlier but had never learned the Wet Collodion process.

Learning the wet collodion process changed how Quinn thought about photography and making art. He knew right away that this was a process he would work in for years, maybe decades. He completely devoted himself to the craft.

The first body of work he made was called, "Portraits From Madison Avenue". He worked on this from 2003 through 2006. This project was exhibited in March 2006 as a solo show at Art Access Gallery in Salt Lake City, Utah. Several pieces of the work were exhibited in various group shows throughout America, too.

In 2006, Quinn moved to Viernheim, Germany, and started working on a new project. In the beginning, it was titled, "Kristallnacht: The Night of Broken Glass" and later changed to, "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" (struggling to come to terms with the past). This was a personal investigation of the events surrounding the Shoah (Holocaust). The images also reflected the experiences and emotions identifying as a person of Jewish descent living in Germany. The work included portraits of Germans, Ausländer (foreigners), and landscapes, significant locations that are relevant to that period of history (destroyed Synagogues, etc.). The project was about place, memory, identity, and indifference. Quinn calls it an extension of "Portraits From Madison Avenue", but on a much larger scale.

Both of the projects were shown in a major exhibition at Centre Iris Gallery for Photography in Paris, France. The show was called, "Glass Memories". The exhibition was up from March 10, 2010, to June 19, 2010. In conjunction with the exhibition, Quinn traveled to Paris each month for 10 days and made portraits, gave lectures, and taught Wet Plate Collodion workshops. He taught four workshops and made 200 portraits in Paris. He will return to Paris every other year (next exhibit in 2012) to exhibit his work, teach and make portraits.

THE F.S. ARCHER PROJECT

Frederick Scott Archer invented the Wet Plate Collodion process in 1851. He died on May 1, 1857. On May 1, 2010, a group of artists, photographers, historians, and people interested in Frederick Scott Archer, gathered at Kensal Green Cemetery in London, England to unveil a new plaque for Archer. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery without ever being recognized for what he freely gave the world—photography as we know it today.

Quinn organized a group of Collodionists and formed the Collodion Collective to oversee the project. This group was responsible for making the event happen. It took over a year to coordinate the ceremony, raise money, and have the new stone carved.  Quinn published the work from the Wet Plate Day 2009 in a book and offered in through Blurb to help raise money for Archer's new plaque and the cost of the ceremony. With the help of the Collective, they were able to have an unveiling ceremony and an exhibition called "In Honour of Archer". It was a historic and very successful event. The BBC published a piece about it as well as the British Photographic History blog.

QUINN’S PUBLICATIONS

He has published five books:

"The Contemporary Wet Plate Collodion Photography Experience," 2006 (out of print).

"Conferring Importance: Thoughts and Images About Identity, Difference, and Memory," 2007 (out of print).

"Chemical Pictures: The Wet Plate Collodion Photography Book & DVD" 2009 (out of print).

"Chemical Pictures: The Wet Plate Collodion Photography Book (2nd Edition)," 2010.

"Chemical Pictures LE 2019 (Limited Edition)" 2019. (out of print)

"Chemical Pictures SE (Standard Edition)” 2020. Available on Amazon click here

“In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of Othering and the Origins of Evil.” 2025 (projected publication date)

The first and last are technical books on the wet collodion process. The "Chemical Pictures (1st Edition)" book had a DVD with 28 videos about the process. The videos can now be viewed on this site with a membership. "Conferring Importance: Thoughts and Images About Identity, Difference, and Memory" is Quinn's graduate thesis/portfolio. He's also written and published several articles about the Collodion process, other historic processes, the history of photography, and the Frederick Scott Archer Project.

QUINN’S WORK & PROJECTS

He is primarily recognized for playing a significant role in reviving the Wet Plate Collodion photographic process in Europe. Quinn traveled around Eastern and Western Europe for five years (2006–2011), evangelizing and teaching the Wet Collodion process. He taught hundreds of individuals the process, from Glasgow to Barcelona, and from Paris to Budapest. He instructed students in art schools, private studios, cultural centers, and galleries. And today, the hundreds he taught are teaching hundreds more. He was invited to China in 2014 to teach the process at the Art Academy of China in Hangzhou. He also built and administered the web's largest and most active Collodion Forum Board (www.collodion.com). He started the forum board in 2003 and sold it to a new owner in 2020.

Quinn's work focuses on underprivileged populations and includes portraiture, landscape, constructed imagery, and still life. He is particularly interested in "otherness," or individuals and places that we prefer to ignore or want to forget about. Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death (1973) and Sheldon Solomon's The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (2015) have had a strong influence on him. His research focuses on death anxiety, the denial of death, and terror management theory. For almost 30 years, he has been engaged with questions about genocide and ethnocide. His questions aren't about what happened, but about why it happened.

His current project (2021-2025) is called “In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of Othering and the Origins of Evil”. It’s a project about the Ute/Tabeguache tribe that lived near Tava Kaavi (Sun Mountain), where Quinn lives in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. The work deals with his struggle to resolve to live on indigenous land—land that was stolen and its people murdered and abused.

It’s mixed media: painting, sculpture, wet and dry collodion negative work, as well as calotypes (paper negatives) printed mostly with palladium and kallitype (K1). He’s made a large body of work for the project in the RA-4 Reversal Direct Color Print process as well. You can read more about the project on his blog.

You can view Quinn's Curriculum Vitae here.

A 20 minute video about Quinn's background, process and interview with a couple of his sitters.