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.

Ruptureology and Rupturegenesis

Have you ever heard of those words? Probably not.

“Ruptureology” and “rupturegenesis” are words that I’ve created to use with my study of creativity and mortality.

Here are some of my notes on this topic as well as part of a self-directed study on the topic (all draft forms).

Ruptureology

The study and practice of living and creating through rupture.
Ruptureology examines what happens when existential defenses collapse—when illusions, cultural buffers, or inherited meanings no longer hold. It asks: how do we metabolize that collapse into form, meaning, and transformation?
In essence, ruptureology is both a psychology and a poetics of confrontation. It studies the processes—psychological, creative, and cultural—by which individuals and societies either deny or integrate death anxiety. The artist, for example, does not seek to repair rupture but to work within it, turning fragmentation into insight, and terror into trace.

“I don’t condemn the illusions people construct to buffer death anxiety. My interest is in what happens when those illusions collapse—whether creative practice can transform the raw terror of mortality into meaning, rather than violence or denial.” Jacobson, Response to Anxiety (n.d., p. 1)

Rupturegenesis

The generative aftermath of rupture—the birth that follows breakdown.
If ruptureology studies the terrain of collapse, rupturegenesis is the alchemical process by which something new emerges from it. It is the transmutation of existential dread into symbolic residue—art, insight, empathy, or ethical awareness.
Rupturegenesis is not redemption or transcendence; it is the slow, embodied making of meaning within finitude. It is how the artist metabolizes death anxiety into creative output—how “terror becomes trace.”

Alchemy

The symbolic process of transformation. In creative and psychological terms, alchemy is how matter—chemical, emotional, or symbolic—is transmuted into meaning. In the collodion process, silver becomes image through ritual and risk. In ruptureology, anxiety becomes insight through creation.

“The transformation of silver salts into an image isn’t just chemistry; it’s alchemy. That alchemical act becomes a metaphor for the way artists transmute existential terror into meaning.” — Jacobson, SDS Overview or Concept (2025, p. 1)

Collapse

The psychic and cultural moment when death anxiety breaches denial. Collapse reveals the fragility of our worldviews and the insufficiency of our myths. It is the point where symbolic immortality fails—and the raw void becomes visible.
But collapse can also mark the beginning of rupturegenesis: the opening through which new forms of meaning emerge. Artists dwell here—between fracture and formation.

Metabolize

The internal reworking of existential anxiety into creative or ethical form. To metabolize is to take in the unbearable and convert it into expression rather than repression. This word bridges Rank’s distinction between the artist and the neurotic: one chokes on the world, the other chews it into meaning.

“By transforming terror into form, the artist reworks rupture into creative output: an external trace, a witness to mortality.” Jacobson, SDS Overview or Concept (2025, p. 1)

Residue / Trace

The tangible and symbolic remainder of an encounter with mortality. Residue is the mark left behind—the plate, the scar, the sentence, the memory. It is both evidence and echo, proof that meaning once passed through matter. I’ve said these words for years. The art happens in the making. The plate itself is residue; it captures the essence of the moment, the shadow of the sitter (or still life), and the fragility of life.

Witness

The conscious act of seeing and staying with what culture denies. Witnessing is both artistic and ethical; it resists erasure by turning the gaze toward suffering, mortality, and historical trauma. In my practice, witness is not documentation—it’s participation. To witness is to stand in relation to the void and refuse to look away.

Immanence

Meaning found within finitude. Immanence rejects transcendence or escape; it roots significance in the here and now. In ruptureology, immanence is the field in which all transformation occurs—the realization that nothing lies beyond death and that creation itself is the sacred act.

Collapse → Rupture → Metabolize → Trace → Witness → Immanence → Rupturegenesis

This is my through line of rupture—a living process of descent and creation. It maps the cycle through which anxiety becomes art, illusion gives way to insight, and denial is replaced by presence.

Otto Rank’s Personality Types

Rank’s Three Personality Types

Adapted (the “normal” person): Finds security in culture, tradition, religion, consumerism, or ideology. Adapted individuals manage their fear of death by adhering to social norms. Creativity, if expressed, stays within socially approved channels.

Neurotic: Overwhelmed by existential fear. The individual withdraws inward, unable to sublimate their anxiety. “Chokes” on mortality awareness, unable to transform it into external work.

Creative / Artist: Equally exposed to death anxiety, but metabolizes it through art or thought. Reworks inner terror into external form (art, philosophy, writing). They exist in a state of tension with culture, frequently stepping outside its protective illusions.

This framework clarifies that the "normal/adapted" person is not absent; rather, they represent the cultural baseline.

Rank’s Types Through the Lens of Ruptureology (my conversion)

Adapted (Buffered): Aligns with the dominant worldview to avoid rupture. The individual utilizes cultural shields such as religion, nationalism, and consumerism to suppress their awareness of death. Lives are “protected” inside the illusion—death anxiety is smoothed over rather than faced.

Neurotic (Collapsed): The rupture breaks through without mediation. The individual feels overwhelmed by mortality and struggles to transform it into meaning. Anxiety implodes inward, leading to paralysis or dysfunction.

Creative / Artist (Metabolizing Rupture): Confronts the rupture rather than fully denying or collapsing under it. Death anxiety becomes raw material—transformed into art, philosophy, ritual, or resistance. Lives on the edge between denial and confrontation, where meaning is forged.

This dovetails with my Through Line of Rupture:

Buffer → Collapse → Metabolize

The adapted “normal” person lives buffered.

The neurotic collapses under rupture.

The artist metabolizes rupture into creation.

Proximal and distal terror management defenses

Rank (1932/1989) distinguished between the adapted person, the neurotic, and the artist in relation to how each responds to existential anxiety:

“The average man avoids the worst effects of the fear of life and of death by complete adaptation to the collective. He lives not in himself, but in society; he seeks not his own immortality, but to participate in the immortality of the group” (p. 34).

“The neurotic suffers from the same increased consciousness of self as the artist, but he cannot objectify and render it harmless in creative work. He chokes on his own introversions” (pp. 55–56).

“The artist lives the double conflict of the individual and the collective more consciously than others, but he overcomes it in the work of art which creates a new unity of his personality with nature and with humanity. … The artist is able to overcome introversion by projecting his fears into the work of art, where they are mastered, objectified, and given form” (pp. 58, 70).

References:

Jacobson, Q. (n.d.). Response to anxiety [Unpublished manuscript].

Jacobson, Q. (2025, October 3). SDS overview or concept [Unpublished manuscript].

Rank, O. (1989). Art and artist: Creative urge and personality development (C. F. Atkinson, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1932)