Quinn Jacobson is an artist and scholar working where creativity meets the fact of mortality. His practice draws from art, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, theology, and history, not to stack disciplines but to probe a single, stubborn question: how do humans live with the knowledge that everything they love will one day disappear? Through painting, historical photographic processes, and writing, he examines the subtle strategies—both deliberate and unconscious—that people use to soften, divert, or manage the anxiety that comes with being temporary.

His work takes its cue from Ernest Becker and the field of Terror Management Theory, yet it is not a simple illustration of either. Instead, he treats those theories as critical companions. They help illuminate the deeper stakes of artistic practice: what becomes possible when we stop turning away from what frightens us, and how creative acts might serve as a form of encounter rather than escape.

He also produces an ongoing video series, The Creative Mind & Mortality: Artists & Anxiety, on his YouTube channel. The project examines how creatives metabolize their existential struggles through making, in contrast to what Otto Rank called the artiste manqué—those who feel the same pressure of existence but lack a generative outlet. In the series, Quinn traces the difference between being overwhelmed by the world and transforming it. The artist absorbs experience, works it through the self, and returns it to the world in a new form.

This process, as Rank and later Becker argued, becomes both an act of courage and a form of self-justification. Creativity provides a symbolic space where the individual can negotiate finitude on their own terms. As Becker wrote in The Denial of Death, the artist’s work becomes “his private religion,” a way of securing a fragile sense of transcendence through the singularity of what he creates. For Quinn, this is not a romantic idea so much as an honest account of why art matters—because it gives shape to what might otherwise remain unmanageable.

Quinn has published four books on historic photographic processes and remains deeply engaged with nineteenth-century techniques. His studio practice spans calotypes (paper negatives) and both wet and dry collodion, along with an extensive range of printing-out processes that include platinum–palladium, kallitype (Nicol’s K1), Rawlins Oil, cyanotype, photogenic drawing, and other siderotypes. He also works with the RA-4 reversal method to produce in-camera color direct positives. Parallel to this, he maintains a painting and mixed-media practice in acrylic, oil, and collage, moving fluidly between abstraction and non-objective forms as a way of exploring the psychological terrain that underlies his research.

From 2021 to 2024, Quinn worked on a major project and book titled In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of Othering and the Origins of Evil. The work investigates humanity’s long history of genocide and ethnocide through Ernest Becker’s theories of mortality awareness and the defensive structures it generates. Drawing from Terror Management Theory, he examines how death anxiety shapes collective violence, particularly as it relates to the experiences of the Tabeguache-Ute people in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado—a region where he lived and worked for several years. The book is scheduled for publication in June 2026.

This project serves as the foundation for a larger trilogy that extends his inquiry into mortality, creativity, and transformation. Glass Bones, Rupture, and In the Shadow of Sun Mountain will be released between June and November 2026, with each volume approaching these themes from a distinct angle: material, psychological, and historical. Together they form an interconnected exploration of how human beings confront, deflect, and sometimes transform the pressures of existence. Ongoing updates, reflections, and behind-the-scenes material can be found on his blog.

ABOUT QUINN
Photography has been part of Quinn’s life for as long as he can remember. Both of his parents were avid image-makers. His mother with her 35mm and Polaroid cameras, and his father with 8mm film, and every family moment was photographed. In that environment, pictures weren’t decoration; they were a way of paying attention, of holding on to time that moved too quickly. That early immersion shaped Quinn’s sense that images carry emotional and historical weight far beyond their surface.

His professional path began in 1982 when he became a photographer in the United States military. He later earned a Bachelor of Integrated Studies (B.I.S.) in Photography, Visual Art, and Communication from Weber State University in 1993, and in 2007 completed an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art at Goddard College, where he focused on nineteenth-century photographic processes. He is now pursuing doctoral research at Southwestern College in Santa Fe, deepening his work on Ernest Becker’s theories and Terror Management Theory as they relate to creativity and mortality.

QUINN’S STORY

The turn of the millennium marked a major shift in Quinn’s artistic life. After years of searching for a deeper connection to his work—something rooted, tangible, and historically resonant—he encountered the wet plate collodion process. Two images opened that door for him. The first was an anonymous nineteenth-century ambrotype he discovered in John Szarkowski’s Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art. The small portrait stopped him cold; it felt at once fragile and ferociously alive. He knew immediately he had found the medium he had been circling for years.

The second image came through his research: Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond’s haunting portrait Woman With Dead Bird. Diamond, a student of Frederick Scott Archer, used collodion photography inside a British asylum to study and depict what he believed were visible signs of psychological distress. Quinn had already worked with albumen printing during his undergraduate years, but he had never learned the collodion process itself. Those two photographs—anonymous and iconic—made the path unmistakable. They became the catalyst for a practice that would eventually merge historical craft with psychological inquiry and image-making with a lifelong exploration of mortality.

Learning the wet collodion process reshaped Quinn’s understanding of photography and what it meant to make art. The material demanded patience, precision, and a willingness to surrender to chemistry and chance, and he felt instantly at home in that discipline. From the moment he poured his first plate, he knew this was a medium he would stay with for years—possibly for the rest of his life. He threw himself entirely into mastering the craft.

His first major body of work in collodion, Portraits From Madison Avenue, was created between 2003 and 2006. The project centered on the people and stories of a working-class neighborhood in Ogden, Utah, capturing a community often overlooked in contemporary visual culture. The work debuted as a solo exhibition at Art Access Gallery in 2006 and later appeared in group shows across the United States.

In 2006, Quinn moved to Viernheim, Germany, and began a very different kind of project. Initially titled Kristallnacht: The Night of Broken Glass and later renamed Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“struggling to come to terms with the past”), the work became a personal and historical investigation into the legacy of the Shoah. The project explored what it meant to live as a person of Jewish descent in Germany while reckoning with a landscape still marked by loss. He photographed Germans, Ausländer, and sites of historical significance—destroyed synagogues, memorial spaces, and ordinary streets layered with memory. For Quinn, it became a deeper, more expansive continuation of the questions he had begun with Portraits From Madison Avenue: how identity, place, and indifference shape the human condition.

Both projects came together in a major exhibition at Centre Iris Gallery for Photography in Paris titled, “Glass Memories.”The exhibition ran from March 10 to June 19, 2010. During that period, Quinn traveled to Paris monthly, spending ten days at a time making portraits, giving lectures, and teaching wet plate collodion workshops. Over the course of the exhibition, he taught four workshops and made nearly 200 portraits in the city. The experience established an ongoing relationship with Centre Iris, where he planned to return every other year to exhibit new work, teach, and continue the portrait series. The next exibition was in 2012, titled, “The American West Portraits.”

After returning to the United States he made a body of work about Native American massacre sites in Colorado called, “Ghost Dance.” And finally the work about the extermination of the Ute in central Colorado called, “In the Shadow of Sun Mountain.”

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 sold it 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 written and published nine 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.” 2026

“Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind.” 2026

“Rupture: The Creative Response to Death Anxiety—An Arts-Based Inquiry into Anxiety, Imagination, and Transformation.” 2026

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.

June 2026: Glass Bones is published.

September 2026: Rupture is published.

November 2026: In the Shadow of Sun Mountain is published.

Allow me to explicate: I'm building a psychology of artistic practice that takes mortality seriously as a formative force—not as metaphor, but as the pressure that shapes how artists see, make, and live. My trilogy examines this from three angles: Glass Bones provides the theoretical framework, drawing on Becker, Rank, and Terror Management Theory to understand death anxiety and cultural defense. Rupture translates theory into practice, exploring the disciplines and orientations that allow artists to transform existential pressure into creative form. In the Shadow of Sun Mountain offers lived witness—thirty years of working with nineteenth-century processes, paint, clay, broken materials, plants, people, and the mountain landscapes as sites where mortality and imagination meet. Together, they map the terrain where awareness becomes art: Theory → Practice → Witness.

This research is situated within liminal space: psychological, material, and cultural thresholds produced by mortality awareness. Rather than resolving death anxiety through symbolic closure, the work asks what becomes possible when creative practice holds the threshold open long enough for transformation to occur.

Mortality awareness places me in a permanently liminal condition. I am alive, but never free of the knowledge that I will not remain so. From a Beckerian perspective, this is not incidental; it is the core destabilizing fact of consciousness. I am an animal capable of symbol-making who cannot fully believe in my own symbols, a being suspended between embodiment and abstraction, presence and disappearance.

I do not experience this condition as episodic or developmental, something to be outgrown or resolved. It is structural. Consciousness itself unfolds at the threshold. What culture often treats as pathology or anxiety to be managed, I understand as the ground from which meaning-making arises. Creative practice, in this sense, is not an escape from liminality but a way of inhabiting it with attention and responsibility, giving form to what cannot be stabilized without distortion.

I will be making new work—photographs, paintings, and mixed media for Glass Bones and Rupture. My work from the mountain will be featured in Sun Mountain.

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. He has been grappling with questions about genocide and ethnocide for nearly 30 years. His questions aren't about what happened but about why it did.

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. This book also tackles the issue of artists grappling with their own mortality and how it influences their creative process.

The book contains paintings, wet and dry collodion negative work, as well as photogenic drawings and calotypes (paper negatives) printed mostly with palladium and kallitype (K1/K2). He has also created a significant body of work for the project using the RA-4 Reversal Direct Color Print process. You can read more about the project on his blog.

You can view Quinn's curriculum vitae here.

Favorite Books and Authors (partial):
The Denial of Death, (1973) Ernest Becker
Escape from Evil (1975) Ernest Becker
The Birth and Death of Meaning (1962) Ernest Becker
The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (2015) Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Thomas A. Pyszczynski
The Last Messiah (1933), Essay, Peter Wessel Zapffe
The Ernest Becker Reader (2005) Daniel Liechty
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2018) Thomas Ligotti

Favorite Films (partial):
Gummo (1997), Harmony Korrine
Julian DonkeyBoy, (1999), Harmony Korrine
American Movie, (1999), Chris Smith
American Job, (1996), Chris Smith
Stevie (2002 film) Steve James and Kartemquin Films

Favorite Music/Musicians (partial):
Willie Nelson
Black Sabbath
Led Zeppelin
R.L. Burnside
Taj Mahal
Beastie Boys
Unseen Ghost
John Lee Hooker
Dope Lemon
Otis Taylor
Brank Bjork
Barns Courtney
Billie Eilish
Townes Van Zandt
Amy Annette
Jack White (all iterations)
The Be Good Tanyas
Buck Owens
Dire Straits
The Stone Roses
Johnny Cash
The Record Company
Men at Work
Soundgarden
Lynyrd Skynyrd
Alice in Chains

A 20 minute video about Quinn's background, process and interview with a couple of his sitters. This is from the series called, “Portraits From Madison Avenue.”