Glass Bones: Chapter 1 - Thr Problem We Don't Admit

The chapter is titled "The Problem We Don't Admit." It asks a simple but unsettling question: What happened when human beings first realized they were going to die?

The chapter explores mortality awareness as the defining rupture in human consciousness and introduces the central ideas that the rest of the book builds upon. It draws from the work of Ernest Becker, Ajit Varki, and Danny Brower and Terror Management Theory, while asking what this means for everyday life, creativity, and our search for meaning.

If you've been following this project, I hope you'll enjoy the reading.

Preface and Introduction - First Reading: Glass Bones

Greetings,

I hope this finds you well.

Thank you for the tremendous response to Glass Bones. I truly appreciate it. I’ve been deeply immersed in my new project, Rupture: The Creative Response to Death Anxiety.

I also posted the first part of a reading from Glass Bones. I plan to continue the series over the coming weeks, reading sections from the book and talking a little about the ideas behind the work.

Glass Bones Going to Print

“The photograph preserves presence by recording its disappearance.” — Quinn Jacobson, Glass Bones (influenced by John Berger and Roland Barthes)

I’ll be doing the final edits on the manuscript this week. I’ve now gone through the book several times, including all 26 chapters, the introductions, conclusions, notes, and preface. Honestly, it’s hard to describe the amount of work this has been. Some days I wonder what exactly I committed myself to, and then something clicks into place, a paragraph opens up, an image suddenly belongs where it should, and I feel inspired all over again.

I want to thank the people who have acted as readers throughout this process and worked through the chapters with me each week. Your feedback, criticism, encouragement, and patience have mattered more than I can say. This book is better because of you.

I don’t know the exact date the manuscript will go to the printer yet, but my goal is to have a proof copy in my hands by the end of the month, possibly sooner. I’ll make signed hardcover copies available to anyone interested for the cost of printing and shipping, and there will also be a paperback version on Amazon at cost.

I’ve decided to hold off on the ebook version for now. I may eventually release one, but at this point I feel like this book is meant to exist as a physical object. With the amount of artwork, texture, and visual material woven through it, it simply feels better in your hands than on a screen.

“The photograph preserves presence by recording its disappearance.”

— Quinn Jacobson, Glass Bones (influenced by John Berger and Roland Barthes)

I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: this project has never been about commerce or making money. It’s about sharing ideas, artwork, and questions that I think matter. It’s about trying to better understand what drives us as human beings, especially in the shadow of mortality.

I’ll begin work on RUPTURE next week and officially start building that book in June. It will be an entirely unique kind of project. Glass Bones is heavily theoretical and philosophical. RUPTURE will foreground the artwork itself: the images, the darkroom, the studio, the materials, the failures, the residue, and the physical process of making. The theory will still be there, but mostly in the background.

What I’m increasingly interested in is whether the work itself can function as epistemological evidence. Not illustration of an idea after the fact, but evidence generated through creative practice itself (arts-based research methodology). The photographs, paintings, plates, chemicals, traces, and repetitions are becoming central to what I’m calling Rupture Field Theory (RFT). This book will lean heavily on Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida), Susan Sontag (On Photography), and many other artists and creators.

UPDATE: GLASS BONES WILL BEGIN SHIPPING JUNE 23, 2026—CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION.

My Book: The Final Stages of Glass Bones

I wanted to share a few pages from Glass Bones—a glimpse into how the book is beginning to take shape as a physical object.

I’m still working. Still in the darkroom, still at the canvas, still refining the manuscript. Every day. But it’s close now. Close enough that I can begin to think less about what it is becoming and more about where it might live once it leaves my hands.

Right now, I’m planning a small hardback run (5.5” x 8.5”)—somewhere in the range of 250 to 300 copies. Not because I expect a large audience, but because I’m more interested in placement than scale. This isn’t a commercial project. It moves in the opposite direction.

What I keep returning to is the idea of libraries, especially at art schools. It’s a niche path, but that’s always been where this work lives.

There’s something compelling about the possibility that this book could sit quietly on a shelf, embedded within a larger system of knowledge, waiting for the right kind of encounter. Not driven by visibility or promotion, but by proximity. Someone searches for a keyword—mortality, art, psychology, violence, or meaning—and this object appears. They take it down. Spend time with it. Or don’t. But the encounter remains possible.

In that sense, distribution becomes part of the work.

If Becker is even partially right that culture functions as a buffer against the anxiety of death, then placing a book like this into public collections may operate as a small countercurrent. Not as a corrective, exactly, but as an opening. A space where the usual defenses are not reinforced but perhaps loosened.

Because this project doesn’t offer resolution.

Much of the work moves through sites of rupture—historical, psychological, and cultural. The violence enacted against the Tabeguache Ute, for example, is not framed as an aberration of cruelty but as something emerging from a deeper structure. A culture unable to face its own mortality displaces that terror outward, producing an “other” to carry what it cannot hold itself.

The images that follow don’t attempt to resolve that. They witness it.

They sit in the places where meaning breaks down and remain there long enough for something else to surface—something less stable, but perhaps more honest.

There will be a digital version. An audiobook as well. Both extend access, which matters. But they inevitably flatten part of the experience. The scale of the images, the pacing, the way text and image occupy the same field—those things don’t translate cleanly.

This has always been a hybrid project. Part book, part object. Something meant to be read but also handled. Something that lives not just in circulation but in place.

More soon.

Table of contents.

How each chapter begins: a quote and an image somewhere within the chapter or at the end.

At the end of the book, I cover my work over the past 30+ years.

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

Glass and Gold - Glass Prints

This piece grew out of a technical curiosity, but it didn’t stay there for long.

I’ve been experimenting with collodio-chloride on glass, using a wet collodion half-plate negative as the source image. What interested me initially was the reversal: taking a process already defined by fragility and asking it to exist as an object rather than an image alone. Printing onto glass changes the relationship immediately. The photograph no longer sits on a surface; it hovers within one. It becomes something you look into rather than at. I’ve printed on glass before—carbon, oil, and collodio-chloride. This gold addition was new.

That shift matters to me. My work is often in the unstable space between presence and absence, between what can be held and what can't. Collodio-chloride amplifies that tension. The image is there, but it never fully settles. It feels provisional, as if it could just as easily slip away.

Exposed, pre-fix.

After the print was finished, I backed the glass with gold. That decision wasn’t decorative. Gold carries a long cultural history of sanctification, permanence, value, and transcendence. Gold is what we use to signify that something matters and endures. In this context, it felt closer to a defense mechanism. A thin layer of assurance applied to something fundamentally unstable. The gold doesn’t resolve the fragility of the glass or the image; it frames it and maybe even tries to protect it. That tension is the point.

I’m aware that backing photographic images with gold carries the history of the orotone, a process designed to heighten luminosity and permanence. I’m interested in that lineage, but not in reviving it. Here, the gold isn’t about brilliance or finish. It functions more like a psychological gesture, an attempt to stabilize what can’t be stabilized, to sanctify something that is already slipping.

The skull forms in the background weren’t meant to announce themselves. They emerge slowly, almost reluctantly. That’s how mortality functions most of the time. It isn’t usually dramatic or explicit. It sits behind us, watching, shaping our behavior without demanding our attention. I wanted that presence to feel ambient rather than symbolic, something you notice only after spending time with the image.

The central figure feels assembled rather than organic. Stacked. Held together. I think of it less as a subject and more as a structure, a self-constructed one under pressure. The translucence of the collodio-chloride allows it to exist somewhere between solidity and dissolution, which mirrors the psychological space I’m often working in. Identity here isn’t fixed. It’s maintained.

From an arts-based research perspective, this piece feels important because the process itself is doing the thinking. I’m not illustrating theory after the fact. The materials are pushing back. Glass breaks. Chemistry misbehaves. The image resists control. Those risks aren’t incidental; they’re where the knowledge lives. The work knows something because it could fail.

What consistently resonates with me is the delicate boundary between reverence and denial. The gold can read as a halo or a shield. I’m interested in that ambiguity. It reflects the way we often try to stabilize what we know is unstable—through meaning, through ritual, through objects that promise endurance.

This piece doesn’t try to solve anything. It holds a condition. It sits with fragility rather than sealing it over. That feels honest to me.

Much more exploring ahead! I might break these and see what that produces. And I’m in the process of getting some front-surface mirror material to experiment with; I mention the technique in my book to make “faux” daguerreotypes. I’m going to use collodio-chloride to see what happens.

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)

Notes From the Studio: Staring at the Sun

I made a new tintype today (I made several, actually)—something small, simple, and unexpectedly revealing. It began as a response to reading Yalom’s Staring at the Sun. I sculpted a tiny figure and a rough, spiked “sun” and set them up in the studio to explore that familiar tension between awe, fear, and the search for meaning.

But once the plate dried, the image took on a different life. The “sun” started to resemble a virus, and the little figure looked like he was trying to negotiate with a force he couldn’t quite name. It shifted the whole feeling of the piece. It’s strange when a photograph teaches you something you didn’t intend, but that’s usually a sign you’re on the right track.

“Staring at the Sun—V.2,” Whole Plate Tintype—November 30, 2025 - Las Cruces, New Mexico

The chemistry added its own voice, too. I shot it wide open with an 1872 Dallmeyer 3B lens, using natural New Mexico light. Because the developer had no alcohol in it, the plate is full of sweeping, ghostlike marks, patterns that feel like turbulence or weather. Those imperfections have become one of the things I trust most about collodion. They reveal the atmosphere of the moment in a way nothing else can.

This little setup feels like the start of a new thread, a kind of still-life cosmology. Small figures, simple objects, big questions. I won’t say more yet, but I’m excited about where this can go.

I’ll keep at it and see what develops ;-)