Holding the Unresolvable: Mortality and Form in a Kallitype Portrait

I made this image over the weekend. A friend, a fellow doctoral student, sitting in front of the camera. Bare-chested. Two skulls held against the torso, or resting there, or emerging from it. The preposition doesn’t quite hold, which is part of the point.

What you see is simple. What the image is doing is not.

I've been thinking for years about where images actually come from, not technically but psychologically. What pressures give rise to them. What gets carried into the frame, intended or not. This portrait didn't begin as a concept about mortality. It began as a feeling I've been circling a long time: that death isn't something we encounter occasionally, from a safe distance, but something we are already inside of. Always. The awareness held at arm's length. Functional, buffered, but never fully absent.

Ernest Becker called this the negotiated space of human existence—knowing, but not fully feeling (Becker, 1973). Culture itself, he argued, is largely a structure built to manage what we can't afford to fully face. We live between awareness and denial, close enough to the fact of mortality to be shaped by it and far enough to keep moving. This image tries to make that band visible. Not as argument. As form.

The Body as Pressure

The first decision was compositional: a frontal, centered figure. The kind of formal stability that early photographic portraiture used to convey dignity, legibility, and presence. That stability matters here because it sets up what follows.

Then the disruption.

The skulls aren't beside the body or held out for display. They're not props arranged for symbolic effect. They hover in the uncertain space between inside and outside the torso—not quite organs, not quite objects. The ambiguity is the point. If they were clearly internal, the image would collapse into anatomy. If they were clearly external, it would resolve too quickly into symbol. What I wanted was something less settled, something closer to what Becker describes as the ongoing, never-quite-finished negotiation between awareness and denial. Death not repressed, but not integrated either. Present, but unstable.

What I didn't anticipate until I saw the finished print was the gaze.

He isn't looking at the camera. He's looking past it, slightly—not evasively, but as if what he's attending to exists just outside the frame. That deflection changes the image's register entirely. It doesn't become a confrontation between viewer and subject. It becomes something more like shared witness: two figures—the one in the frame and the one looking at it—both oriented toward something that isn't fully visible. Something that hasn't arrived yet, or hasn't been named.

Trace, Not Symbol

There's always a risk with the skull. It's one of the most overdetermined objects in the history of art. From vanitas painting forward, it carries a ready-made meaning: mortality, transience, and memento mori.

That's not what I'm after. Or at least, not that way.

What I'm trying to do is shift the skull away from symbol and toward trace. The distinction matters. A symbol points toward meaning. A trace is the residue of a process already underway. Not a sign placed onto the surface to indicate death, but something more like the visible remains of a metabolic struggle that hasn't resolved.

In the framework I've been developing around rupture—what I'm calling the Rupture Field—this image sits somewhere between exposure and trace. The rupture has already occurred. Mortality awareness has exceeded the capacity of ordinary denial to contain it. What remains aren't conclusions. They're fragments. Partial forms. Something that couldn't be fully metabolized and so became visible instead.

That's what these skulls feel like to me. Not imposed onto the body from outside but surfaced from within it. The pressure finding form.

The Material Is Part of the Argument

The process here isn't incidental.

Kallitype, especially gold-toned, has a tonal range that is long, compressed, and quiet. Nothing leaps forward. The image doesn't announce itself—it accrues. There's something about the way the shadows pool and the highlights hold that makes the image feel like it already belongs to another time, even as it depicts someone sitting in front of a camera in the present.

And the paper—Revere Platinum—has a weight and tooth that digital processes can't replicate. You're aware that you're holding something. That the image exists on a surface that will age, fade, and eventually fail.

Otto Rank argued that the creative act is bound up with the desire to stabilize experience against loss—to produce something that persists beyond the individual life (Rank, 1932/1989). But I want to be careful here, because I don't think that's exactly what's happening in this print. The kallitype isn't trying to outlast anyone. It's not an immortality project in Rank's sense.

It's something closer to metabolization: making the pressure of mortality awareness visible while it is still being lived. Not preservation. Not transcendence. Processing. The print as a site where the rupture is held, turned over, and examined—without being resolved.

The difference matters. Preservation seals the wound. Metabolization keeps it open long enough to learn something from it.

The Necklace

I didn't plan for the necklace to do what it does. I noticed it after the print was finished, when I was looking at the full image for the first time.

Barthes would call this the punctum—the detail that arrives uninvited and redirects the image's meaning. But what interests me methodologically is something slightly different: not that the necklace pierced me as a viewer, but that it revealed itself to me as a researcher. The practice had generated something the conceptual framework hadn't predicted. The studio was thinking.

What it introduced was a different register entirely: relation, identity, and continuity. Something cultural and personal and chosen, against all the elements in the frame that belong to no one—the anonymous skulls, the bare torso, the ambiguous dark ground. The necklace says: this is a particular person. He has a history. He is located in a world of meaning.

And then everything around it reasserts: he is also mortal.

Rank makes a distinction that I keep returning to here. Religion, he suggests, emerges from collective belief in immortality—the promise that death will be overcome. Art arises from the individual's confrontation with impermanence—the refusal of that promise, or at least the refusal to look away from it (Rank, 1932/1989). This image seems to live between those poles. The necklace carries something like religious weight—continuity, relation, belonging—while everything surrounding it insists on the mortal body.

The body is no longer singular. It's carrying multiple realities at once: biological, relational, symbolic, and mortal. Not in sequence. Simultaneously.

What the Image Knows

I want to say something about methodology, because it matters here and I don't want to leave it implicit.

This image is not an illustration of a theoretical argument. It's not Becker made visual, or Rank translated into form. If it were, the essay would be sufficient and the image redundant. What I'm claiming—and what arts-based research methodology asks us to take seriously—is that the image produces a different kind of knowledge than the writing does. Not the same knowledge in a different register. Something the writing cannot replicate without remainder.

Propositional language can describe the negotiated space between awareness and denial. It can name it, analyze it, and situate it theoretically. What it cannot do is construct one. The kallitype doesn't point toward that space. It builds an instance of it. The viewer who stays with this image long enough, who lets the tonal range accrue rather than scanning for meaning, is briefly inside the condition the writing can only describe from outside.

That's not a claim about aesthetic experience. It's an epistemological one.

Practice-led research proceeds from the assumption that making is a form of inquiry, that the studio generates knowledge the conceptual framework hasn't yet predicted, and that this excess is methodologically significant rather than incidental. The necklace is my clearest evidence. I didn't plan for it to do what it does. I didn't theorize it in advance. It arrived in the finished print as something the process had produced independently of my intentions, and it changed what the image knew. That's the practice thinking. The researcher's job, afterward, is to follow where it went.

What the image knows that this essay doesn't: what it feels like to not be met by the subject's gaze. To stand in front of a figure who is looking past you, toward something outside the frame, and to realize that you are not the recipient of a statement but a fellow witness. The essay can describe that experience. It cannot produce it. The image produces it every time, for anyone willing to look long enough.

That gap, between what the writing can say and what the image can do, is not a limitation of the research. It's the point of it.

Condition, Not Conclusion

What I notice more and more in my own work is that I'm less interested in making statements than in staging conditions. This image doesn't explain anything. It doesn't arrive at a conclusion. It doesn't argue.

It presents a situation: a person, standing there, holding themselves together. With something else present. Not named. Not integrated. Not fully metabolized.

That feels honest to me.

If Becker is right, and I believe he is, then most of life unfolds precisely in that space. Not in full awareness, and not in complete denial. In the narrow band between them, where we can continue to function without being overwhelmed by what we know. The task isn't to resolve that tension. The task is to stay inside it long enough to make something true.

That's what I was trying to do here.

Not to illustrate mortality. Not to comfort anyone, including myself.

But to make the pressure visible. To let it take form. And to see what that form had to say.

References

Barthes, R. (1980). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (R. Howard, Trans.). Hill and Wang.

Becker, E. (1973). The Denial of Death. Free Press.

Rank, O. (1989). Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development (C. F. Atkinson, Trans.). Agathon Press. (Original work published 1932)

Arts-Based Research Methodology

What is it?
Arts-based research treats creative practice as a site of inquiry rather than just expression. The work is not an illustration of an idea—it is where the thinking happens. Through process, material, and form, it allows aspects of experience, especially those tied to uncertainty, embodiment, and mortality, to surface in ways that exceed purely analytical methods.

A Metaphor
Think of two ways to understand the ocean: One person stands on the shore with instruments, measuring waves, salinity, and depth. Another person enters in the water, swims, feels the currents, struggles, and floats.

Both are learning something real.
But they’re learning different kinds of truth.

Arts-based research is closer to the second approach.

It assumes that some forms of knowledge, especially around experience, emotion, identity, or mortality, can’t be fully grasped from the shoreline. You have to enter the medium, work through it, and let something emerge.

Research?
In arts-based research:

The making is intentional inquiry, not just expression.

The process is examined, documented, and reflected on.

The work contributes to understanding something beyond itself.

So it’s not just “I made this painting or photograph.”
It’s: What did making this painting reveal that couldn’t have been known otherwise?

The Ocotillo Brush: Toned Kallitype Print
This isn’t really a photograph of a plant. It’s a record of an encounter. The ocotillo is there, but what I’m actually seeing is the condition under which it was seen—light slowed down, translated, fixed, and then reworked through chemistry. It feels less like representation and more like a process functioning as a way of knowing.

If I approach this work as arts-based research, the question shifts for me. I’m not asking, what is this an image of? I’m asking, what does this process allow me to see or understand that I couldn’t access any other way?

The spines hold that question. They’re sharp, repetitive, almost excessive. But in print, they do not read simply as the defensive structure of a desert plant. They start to feel like interruptions—points where the flow of the image becomes caught. The light hits them, slows, translates into tone, and something in my perception hesitates. My eye doesn’t move cleanly through the frame. It catches, adjusts, and recalibrates. That hesitation feels important. It mirrors something closer to lived experience, especially in moments where awareness intensifies.

The tonal range plays a part in that. The warmth of the toned kallitype doesn’t lock the image down the way silver might. It leaves it slightly unsettled. The forms hover a bit. Nothing feels fully resolved. I’m looking at something that seems to be in the process of becoming or maybe slipping away. That ambiguity matters. It keeps the image open. It resists closure.

The edges are doing their own kind of work. The pooled chemistry, the uneven border—those aren’t mistakes to me. They’re part of the evidence. They point back to the conditions of making (proof of process). They keep the process visible. Instead of pretending the image is clean or neutral, they remind me that it was constructed, handled, and negotiated.

When I place the image inside my framework, it feels like it sits somewhere between exposure and metabolization. The ocotillo itself is already a structure built for extremity—for heat, for scarcity, for survival under pressure. But the image doesn’t turn that into something heroic. Instead, it holds the tension. The spines protect, but they also expose something fragile. They mark a limit.

What the process seems to do is metabolize that tension into form.

The wet collodion negative brings duration into it. There’s time in the image—time that requires stillness, attention, a kind of agreement between me, the subject, and the environment. The kallitype print then translates that into another material language, one that carries its own instability and history. What I end up with isn’t a window onto the world. It’s an artifact of pressure, decisions, and transformation.

The knowledge here isn’t something I can easily state outside the work. It’s embedded in the relationships—between the plant and the desert, between my body and the exposure, between the chemistry and its limits, between the image and its refusal to fully settle.

What I recognize in it is this:
Perception under pressure doesn’t simplify—it thickens.
Form, if I stay with it long enough, starts to show me where it breaks down.
And the act of making isn’t about translating what I see. It’s about staying with something long enough that it can take shape without collapsing.

Ocotillo, Chihuahuan Desert

I’ve started working on my Self-Directed Study (SDS) and my book, Glass Bones.

I made this negative today in the desert near my house. I’ve always loved the ocotillo. I even made a large painting (in bloom) of one that hangs in our bedroom (see below). This image comes from the place where rupture enters experience and refuses to remain abstract. In the desert, beauty and threat are inseparable. The spines of the ocotillo catch the midday sun until they appear almost skeletal, held in that narrow space where form begins to emerge under pressure. The collodion plate becomes a vessel for that exposure. What remains on the glass is not just a picture of a plant but a trace of light, time, and the awareness that everything we see is already passing.

For the technical geeks: f/8 at 6 seconds, Dallmeyer 3B lens, redeveloped negative (pyro + AgNO₃). It felt good to make this plate today. I’ll print it on a few different POP papers and see which one speaks back.

New Mexico—March 24, 2026
© Quinn Jacobson

Ocotillo in bloom—36" x 48” acrylic and mixed media. 2025

Existential Literacy

“Feed your head.”

That line from Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit has always felt like more than a psychedelic slogan. Beneath the surreal imagery of Alice in Wonderland and altered perception is a deeper invitation: look more closely at the world you think you understand.

In this episode of The Creative Mind & Mortality, I introduce the idea of existential literacy—the capacity to live in conscious relation to impermanence. Most of us learn at some point that we are going to die, but we spend most of our lives keeping that knowledge at a safe psychological distance. The mind is built that way. But some people live closer to that awareness.

This podcast explores what happens when mortality awareness moves closer to the surface of experience—when the temporary nature of life becomes part of how we perceive beauty, relationships, creativity, and meaning. Rather than treating this awareness as a pathology, I suggest it can become a kind of literacy: a way of reading the world through the lens of impermanence.

Drawing on Ernest Becker’s work on death anxiety, existential philosophy, and my experience as an artist, I explore how creative practice can become a place where mortality awareness is metabolized rather than avoided. In the act of making, the anxious future-scanning self briefly loosens its grip, and something else takes over: attention, presence, and the strange grace of being fully alive in a moment that will not last.

In that sense, the message behind White Rabbit feels unexpectedly appropriate: Sometimes the most important thing we can do is feed the part of the mind that is willing to look more deeply at reality—even when it’s uncomfortable.

The Outline and the Drift

I made this image today using a dead bird mounted on black-painted cardboard, then worked around the body rather than on it. The decision felt important. I didn’t want to manipulate the bird into meaning or turn it into a symbol that behaved too neatly. I wanted to acknowledge the body as it was and let my response happen in the space around it. The marks I painted loosely reference feathers, but only in the most unstable sense. They’re not meant to describe anatomy. They’re an attempt to register something leaving the body at death, not as transcendence or ascent, but as dispersal. Whatever animates a living being doesn’t depart cleanly. It destabilizes. It lingers as a trace.

I was also intentionally playing with the visual language of a chalk outline, the kind left at a crime scene. That gesture carries a particular cultural weight. A chalk outline is an attempt to fix an event in place, to impose order after something irreversible has already occurred. It marks where a body was, not where it went. In this image, that outline sits in tension with the radiating marks around it. One gesture tries to contain the loss, to hold it still. The other admits that containment has already failed. Together, they stage a familiar human dilemma: the impulse to document death versus the fact that death resists explanation.

The contrast between the bird’s spanning wings and the surrounding painted “feathers” matters to me. The body is heavy, finished, and unequivocally still. The marks around it are directional but unresolved, interrupted, and uneven. They don’t form a halo. They don’t promise meaning. They reflect the lag that often follows death, the moment when the body has stopped but our perception hasn’t caught up yet. Meaning keeps moving even when life has ended. The image lives in that gap.

I’m not making a claim here about what death is or what leaves the body when it happens. I’m more interested in the human need to respond once stillness becomes unbearable. The marks don’t prove that energy exists. They mark the moment when we can no longer tolerate absence without gesture. For me, that’s where the work begins: not in explanation or consolation, but in staying with what remains unresolved and allowing the image to hold that tension without trying to seal it shut.

Animality: The Part of Us We Keep Trying to Forget

One of the simplest but hardest ideas for people to accept is that we are animals who know we will die.

That sentence alone has more psychological weight than most of us want to deal with. We are more than just living things that move through time. We are aware of ourselves, and our bodies get older, break down, and disappear. And we know this. That information alters everything.

This is where Ernest Becker begins. In The Denial of Death, Becker posited that human psychology is influenced by a fundamental contradiction. We are biological entities motivated by instinct, hunger, fear, and reproduction; concurrently, we are symbolic entities endowed with imagination, language, and self-reflection. We have bodies that will die, and our minds can picture that death before it happens. The conflict between those two facts never goes away. It just gets taken care of.

That tension is right in the middle of animality.

Being an animal means being weak. People bleed. Bodies decay. Bodies break down. That doesn't change, no matter how smart or culturally accomplished you are. But most of modern life is set up to keep that truth far away. We keep the dying out of sight. We make decay into a medical issue. We raise the mind, the self, the brand, and the legacy as if they could somehow float away from the body.

Terror Management Theory says that this is not a coincidence. When reminders of our animal nature break through, like illness, aging, death, or even some kinds of art, they make us anxious on a deep, often unconscious level. The answer is almost never calm, though. It's protection. We hold on to our identities, beliefs, status, and moral frameworks more tightly when they promise that we are more than just meat that is going to die out.

The skull has always been one of the best ways to show this problem. It takes away everything that makes us who we are, reminding us that we are just physical matter with a time limit. Skulls don't fight. They don't talk about it. They just give testimony.

Rachel and Ross Menzies talk about how much of human behavior is based on avoiding this confrontation in their book Mortals. Not just being afraid of dying, but being afraid of being an animal that has to die. We deal with that fear by keeping busy, doing health rituals, telling success stories, and always trying to be better. In most cases, the goal is not to live forever. It is a mental distance from what will happen to the body.

That's what this picture is trying to show.

The Glasshead–Stoneman is standing up, put together, and almost ceremonial. The stone blocks make up a body that looks solid, scarred, planned, and calm. The glass head on top is clear, glowing, broken, and fragile. Skulls float behind it, not quite there and not quite gone. They didn't read as reminders of death, but as witnesses. The truth about animals is there, but it won't stay out of the way.

Glass is important here. Heat and violence make glass. It looks like it will last forever, but it breaks easily. It shows its own cracks while carrying light. It is an uncomfortable material that is between solid and broken. A lot like the human self.

Stone suggests strength. Glass makes things look fragile. The skulls show that something is going to happen.

They make a quiet argument that no amount of structure or symbolic architecture can change our animal nature. We can make identities. We can add meaning. We can give ourselves names. But the body is still there. The animal is still there. Death stays.

Even though it makes people uncomfortable, this is not a negative statement. Becker himself thought that this tension is what makes creativity, art, and meaning come to life. The issue does not stem from our animalistic nature. The issue is that we put so much effort into pretending we aren't.

Art does something important for the mind when it lets animality back into the room without being showy or moralizing. It lowers the defenses just enough for the person to be recognized. Don't panic. Acknowledgment. The kind that says, "This is what we have to work with."

The Glasshead–Stoneman does not fix the problem. It doesn't make you feel better. It just keeps the animal and the symbol in the same frame, not letting either one go away.

That might be enough.

Because confronting our animality does not diminish the significance of life. It makes it sharper. It reminds us that everything we build, love, and make is done inside a body that will eventually fail. And oddly enough, that's what makes those actions important.

The Red Hand Problem

How artists metabolize existential anxiety, and why the work still matters.

I keep returning to the same question, no matter how many theories I read or objects I make: What exactly happens to existential anxiety when it moves through the hands of an artist?

Not rhetorically. Mechanically. Psychologically.

The image above is one attempt to make that process visible. Three pale figures stand upright, stripped of detail, reduced almost to afterimages. They are not portraits so much as placeholders. Awareness has rendered their bodies thin. Over them reaches a red hand, oversized and intrusive, neither comforting nor gentle. It interrupts and intrudes. It stains. It marks.

That hand is not expression. It is intervention.

Most people manage death anxiety by keeping it diffuse, by never letting it fully localize. The artist does the opposite. The anxiety is brought forward, concentrated, and given a task. Creation becomes a site of containment. The fear does not disappear, but it changes state. It becomes workable.

This is what I mean by metabolizing existential anxiety. Not purging it. Not transcending it. Converting it into form.

Psychologically, this matters more than we often admit. The act of making gives the anxious mind boundaries. Time slows. Attention narrows. The self becomes less abstract and more procedural. The question shifts from What does it all mean? to What happens if I put this here? That shift is not trivial. It is regulatory. It allows consciousness to stay in contact with mortality without flooding.

The white figures in the image are not victims. They are witnesses. They stand because the hand is doing something on their behalf.

This is where arts-based research comes into focus for me. ABR is often framed as alternative knowledge production, which is true but incomplete. Its deeper value lies in its psychological function. Making becomes a way of thinking that does not rely exclusively on symbolic abstraction. Image, material, gesture, and repetition—these are not illustrations of insight; they are the insight.

When anxiety stays purely cognitive, it spirals. When it enters the body through making, it circulates. It acquires rhythm. It becomes legible.

This brings me to the harder question: is there any value in writing books like Glass Bones and Rupture?

If the goal were resolution, probably not. No book resolves the fact of death. No theory seals the crack. But that has never been the real task. The value lies in creating sustained containers where anxiety can be held long enough to be examined without collapsing into distraction or denial.

These books are not answers. They are pressure vessels.

Writing them will force me to stay with the material—psychologically and ethically—longer than images alone sometimes allow. It slows the metabolism. It traces the process. It makes visible what is usually hidden: how fear becomes form, how rupture becomes method, and how meaning is provisional but still worth making.

The red hand, then, is also authorship. It is the decision to intervene rather than look away. To touch the thing that makes us uncomfortable and accept the consequences of contact.

Artists do not escape existential anxiety (not at all). They work it. They give it edges. They give it weight. They give it somewhere to go.

That’s not a cure.
But it is a practice.
And in a culture built on denial, practice may be the most honest form of value we have left.

Living With The Dimmer Switch

One of the biggest challenges I face when I talk about Becker, Rank, Zapffe, or Terror Management Theory isn’t that the ideas are too complex. It’s that they’re describing the very psychological machinery that makes them difficult to understand in the first place. (Becker, 1973; Greenberg et al., 1986; Rank, 1932; Zapffe, 1933/2010).

That’s the paradox.

From an evolutionary perspective, human consciousness didn’t just give us language, imagination, and culture. It gave us a problem no other animal has to solve: we know we’re going to die, and we know it with enough clarity to make life unbearable if that awareness stayed fully online all the time (Becker, 1973; Solomon et al., 2015). So evolution didn’t eliminate the problem. It built a workaround.

These thinkers essentially suggest that the human mind evolved a dimmer switch mechanism. This is not an on-off switch, but rather a regulator (Jacobson, 2025). With too much awareness of death, the organism freezes, panics, or collapses. Too little, and life loses urgency, meaning, and care (Becker, 1973; Yalom, 2008).

So the psyche learned to keep mortality awareness just low enough to function and just high enough to motivate (Greenberg et al., 1986; Solomon et al., 2015).

That’s why so many people genuinely believe they don’t think about death or aren’t afraid of dying. They’re not lying. The system is working exactly as it’s supposed to (Greenberg et al., 1986; Pyszczynski et al., 2015). These defenses operate beneath conscious awareness, the same way breathing or balance does. You don’t feel yourself regulating your blood pressure either, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

In fact, one of the clearest signs that death anxiety is present is the firm belief that it isn’t (Solomon et al., 2015).

Becker’s insight was never that people walk around consciously terrified. It was that culture exists to make sure they don’t have to (Becker, 1973). Worldviews, identities, careers, religions, politics, moral certainty, and even the idea of being a “good person” quietly serve the same psychological function: they tell us we matter in a universe that otherwise wouldn’t notice our disappearance (Becker, 1973; Greenberg et al., 1986). Once those structures are in place, the fear drops out of awareness. The dimmer switch does its job (Jacobson, 2025).

This is also why these ideas often provoke irritation or dismissal instead of curiosity. When someone encounters them for the first time, they aren’t just learning new information. They’re brushing up against the scaffolding that holds their sense of reality together. The mind doesn’t experience that as insight. It experiences it as a threat (Greenberg et al., 1986; Pyszczynski et al., 2015). The response isn’t “Is this true?” so much as “Why does this feel wrong?”

Zapffe pushed this even further and suggested that consciousness itself may be over-equipped for the world it inhabits. We see too much, anticipate too far ahead, and know too well how the story ends (Zapffe, 1933/2010). The defenses he described—isolation, distraction, anchoring, and sublimation—aren’t moral failures. They’re survival strategies (Zapffe, 1933/2010). Without them, the weight of existence would be crushing. So when people recoil from these ideas, they’re doing exactly what the human animal evolved to do.

This is where my work sits.

Artists tend to live closer to that fault line. It's not because we're braver or more enlightened, but rather because creative practice weakens the dimmer switch (Jacobson, 2025; Rank, 1932). Making art requires attention, dwelling, repetition, and exposure. Over time, some of the automatic defenses erode. You keep looking where others glance away. That doesn’t make life easier. It makes it more honest.

This is why arts-based research matters so much to me (Barone & Eisner, 2012). I’m not trying to convince anyone with arguments alone. I’m showing what happens when someone lives with the dimmer turned slightly higher than average and then tries to metabolize what comes into view. The artifacts aren’t illustrations of theory. They are the evidence of a nervous system and a psyche working under different conditions.

So when someone says, “I don’t have death anxiety,” I hear, “My defenses are intact.” And when they say, “This feels abstract,” I hear, “This is getting too close to something I’ve spent my life not naming.”

That isn’t a failure of communication. It’s the terrain.

My work isn’t about forcing understanding. It’s about creating conditions where understanding can happen without overwhelming the person encountering it (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Jacobson, 2025). That’s why I move through story, image, material, land, and memory. I’m not avoiding theory. I’m respecting the psychology that makes theory hard to hear in the first place (Becker, 1973; Solomon et al., 2015).

And in that sense, the difficulty isn’t a flaw in these ideas.

It’s the sound the dimmer switch makes when you try to turn it up.

The resistance.
The discomfort.
The urge to look away.

Those aren’t misunderstandings.

They’re the evidence.

References

Barone, T., & Eisner, E. W. (2012). Arts-based research. SAGE.

Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.

Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (1986). The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory. In R. F. Baumeister (Ed.), Public self and private self (pp. 189–212). Springer.

Jacobson, Q. (2025). Living with the dimmer switch [Blog post manuscript]. Unpublished.

Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., & Greenberg, J. (2015). Thirty years of terror management theory: From genesis to revelation. In J. M. Olson & M. P. Zanna (Eds.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 52, pp. 1–70). Academic Press.

Rank, O. (1932). Art and artist: Creative urge and personality development. W. W. Norton.

Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The worm at the core: On the role of death in life. Random House.

Yalom, I. D. (2008). Staring at the sun: Overcoming the terror of death. Jossey-Bass.

Zapffe, P. W. (2010). The last messiah. (Original work published 1933)

Where My Work Is Heading

On Rewriting, Rebuilding, and Turning Toward Mortality

For years now, I’ve been circling the same set of questions, questions that live somewhere between psychology, philosophy, the studio, and the darkroom. Why do humans deny death? What holds our meaning structures together? And why do artists seem to approach these tensions differently than everyone else, often with a kind of clarity that only comes from standing close to fear?

I’ve been asked why In the Shadow of Sun Mountain still isn’t published. The simple truth is that the book outgrew its original frame. I wrote it during a period when I was wrestling with ideas that didn’t yet have the right container. What I couldn’t see then, but can see now, is that the book was waiting for the structure of my doctoral work. It needed a broader foundation, and I needed more time to understand what I was actually trying to say.

So instead of releasing it in its earlier form, I’ve decided to rework it as part of my PhD. It will become the third manuscript in a three-part sequence I’m developing during the program.

The first manuscript will be an explanation of these theories—death anxiety, denial, worldview defense, and the evolutionary roots of awareness—in a way anyone can read and understand. Simple, accessible, and grounded. The working title is Glass Bones.

The second manuscript will be directed toward artists and toward creatives and will explore how they metabolize existential concerns in ways that differ from non-artists. It will look closely at creative practice as a pathway for meaning-making. The working title is Rupture.

And the third will be a rewritten In the Shadow of Sun Mountain, offered as a real-life example of an artist metabolizing these ideas through creative work, reflection, and lived experience.

All of this leads to the question that my dissertation will take up directly:

What actually happens inside an artist when they confront mortality in their creative practice?

To answer that, I’m turning toward arts-based research methodology. ABR is a natural fit for the work I’ve been doing for decades, because in ABR, the studio becomes the site of inquiry. The process becomes a way of knowing. Material becomes a kind of data. Instead of illustrating findings after the fact, the creative act generates them. It’s not about making art that explains theory; it’s about letting the art reveal what theory can’t access on its own.

So the dissertation will center on creating a completely new body of artwork, work made specifically for this research. Clay figures and/or objects suspended or collapsing under their own weight. Wet collodion images that feel like memory rising through fog and confusion. Paintings and photographs that follow the direction of the inquiry. I want the research to grow out of the process itself, out of the contact with clay, with silver, with pigment, with symbol, and with the ambiguous space where meaning forms.

Journal entry - October 2025.

At the same time, I’ll be studying how others respond to this work and what happens psychologically, symbolically, and emotionally when someone encounters artwork that doesn’t look away from mortality. Death denial shows up in recognizable ways: humor, defensiveness, projection, avoidance, and philosophical distancing. But sometimes something deeper appears: recognition, quiet, even a brief moment of meaning.

ABR gives me a structure to study all of this.

My own creative process.

The images that emerge.

The responses they evoke.

The symbolic patterns that repeat.

The ways meaning cracks open or closes down.

It lets me bring the studio, the psyche, and the research questions into one integrated space.

My hope is to create a body of work that matters both inside academia and beyond it. Art isn’t an accessory to life; it’s a method of survival. Artists metabolize things the culture doesn’t know how to hold directly. We take fear, grief, rupture, and turn them into form, into symbols that others can bear to look at. It isn’t therapy and it isn’t escape. It’s a form of existential transformation.

If I can articulate that process, what it feels like, what it reveals, and how it shapes both the maker and the viewer, then the work will have done something meaningful. It will help explain why creative practice is one of the most honest responses we have to our own mortality.

So that’s the direction I’m heading: a reworked Sun Mountain, a sequence of manuscripts that build the conceptual ground, a new exhibition, and a dissertation that uses arts-based research to study the artist’s encounter with mortality from the inside out. I’m building an integrated body of work, creative, philosophical, and experiential, that examines what it means to be mortal and how artists turn that reality into meaning.

More will unfold as the work begins to take shape.

A Salt Print From Another Life

I printed this 4x5 salt print today from a negative I made back in 2009, when I was living in Germany. Pulling an old plate like this into the present is always a strange experience. It’s like opening a time capsule you didn’t realize you buried. The negative was unvarnished—intentionally, because I wanted to see how far the elements had carried it over sixteen years. The result is this distressed, fractured surface that feels less like damage and more like memory asserting itself.

The subject is a simple setup: a cigar-box guitar propped on an old chair, a yarmulke (I got in Budapest) hanging beside it. At the time, I was thinking about the way ordinary objects can hold the weight of identity and belonging. Today, the print reads differently. The salt process softened everything, pulled it into an older register. The marks, flaws, and chemical bruises add a gravity the original plate didn’t have. It’s as if the print has aged along with me, and it’s finally showing its own scars.

Salt prints have a way of whispering rather than shouting. They blur the line (no pun) between what’s depicted and what’s remembered. This one carries the ghosts of two moments: who I was in 2009, exploring Europe with a camera and too many questions, and who I am now, printing in the desert, working at the intersection of creativity and mortality. These processes keep teaching me that nothing stays untouched—not glass plates, not bodies, not beliefs. Everything changes.

What I love most about this print is that it feels like a conversation between past and present versions of myself. A reminder that every piece of work we make continues living long after we think we’ve finished with it.

Impermanence and Insignificance: A Brief Note from the Void

I’ve been sitting with Escape from Evil again, and every time I revisit Becker’s later work, I feel the same jolt. He names the thing we spend our lives circling. Not death, exactly, but the quieter dread underneath it, the fear of slipping through this world without leaving so much as a fingerprint. Impermanence on one side. Insignificance on the other. It’s a tight little vise. And it’s psychologically terrifying.

Becker saw our terror clearly: we are symbolic creatures who can imagine infinity, yet we’re trapped in these fragile, temporary bodies that can vanish in a moment. The universe isn’t just big. It’s indifferent. And in that indifference, we feel an echo of our own smallness.

“The real fear isn’t the moment of dying. It’s the reckoning that follows: what does our ending reveal about how we lived?”

— Quinn Jacobson

Most of us respond by building what Becker called “immortality projects”—the long list of things we hope will grant us some kind of permanence (like what I’m doing right now). Careers. Families. Beliefs. A reputation. A legacy. Art. Even the small rituals of daily life can start to feel like talismans against oblivion. Becker never mocked these efforts. He understood their necessity. Without them, we’d drown in the sheer scale of our vulnerability.

For me, that tension shows up every time I work. Photography, especially the old processes I use, makes this dance impossible to ignore. A wet collodion plate holds everything and nothing at once. Light settles on silver and forms an image that can last centuries, yet the plate itself is so delicate you can wipe it clean with a rag or crack it between two fingers. It’s the same paradox Becker lived in: durability wrapped in impermanence.

And honestly, that’s why I keep returning to these ancient materials. They tell the truth gently. They remind me that nothing I make will rescue me from the limits of being human. But the making still matters. Maybe that’s the part Becker understood so well: our projects don’t need to defeat insignificance; they only need to give us a way to live with it.

Impermanence isn’t the enemy. Insignificance isn’t a verdict. They’re conditions. The water we swim in, if you will.

What we create—our art, our relationships, our gestures of care—won’t make us immortal. But they mark our brief time here with intention rather than avoidance. They let us stand, for a moment, in the truth of our smallness and still say: I was here. I noticed. I tried.

That might be enough.