Greetings,
I have been having a wonderful summer. I hope yours is going well too, or winter, if you're in that part of the world. In Las Cruces, summer starts in April, so it's been warm here for quite a while. We've been in the 100s °F (38+ °C) for most of June. I think we hit 105 °F (40°C) the other day. Whatever I might say about the heat, I can honestly say it isn't snow.
It's been wonderful to have time to think, make work, read, write, and live with questions without being forced to complete them. I don't miss the PhD program at all. I have no regrets about going through it, but I don't miss it. I'm more productive now and so much happier.
I've realized that I don't do well with busy work or assignments. I'm interested in certain questions, and if someone doesn't understand them or simply isn't interested, that's fine. Let's move on.
The program eventually felt like I was paying people to care about what I was doing. It felt like a strange kind of capitalism with a hint of colonialism mixed in. Every meeting became a transaction. "Okay, the hour is up. We'll see you next time." It wasn't worth it for me.
Then there was the PhD itself. "Dr. Jacobson." F**k off. Really. It never meant much to me, and by the end it meant even less. They never understood that. So many of those students will have buyer's remorse. I guarantee it. I don’t even want to tell you what a year cost me—three years? Oy!
Instead, I'm making work.
I'm experimenting again. Exposing plates. Making marks on canvases. Following ideas instead of assignments.
I was going to post a plate I made today but decided against it. I'm going to hold all of this work back for the book. Everything ends up online now. Every photograph. Every painting. Good, awful, or mediocre. We've become numb from the constant stream of images. Major image fatigue.
So, in the spirit of Roland Barthes, whose Camera Lucida I'm reading again, I've decided not to publish any of this new work online.
The two books quietly guiding this project are Susan Sontag's On Photography and Barthes' Camera Lucida. This body of work is art first. The theory sits underneath it. Those of you who have followed my work over the years know how unusual that is for me. I'm deliberately resisting the urge to explain everything. The work has to carry its own weight.
I'll say this much: I'm working with dead animals, dead plants, and dried vegetation. That may change as the work develops, but these subjects have become central to both the photographs and the paintings.
The motivation driving all of this work is remarkably simple: llustration begins with an answer, and inquiry begins with a question.