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.

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 ;-)

The Birth of Man (La Naissance de l' Homme)

Several years ago, a friend invited me to Brussels, Belgium. He wanted me to meet some of the local photography group and make a couple of wet collodion images for them. I obliged. Brussel’s is a wonderful city. We enjoyed our time there. In fact, we went back a couple of times after that, too.

“The Birth of Man,” Whole Plate Ambrotype (Wet Collodion), May Claerhout (1939–2016), Brussels, Belgium 2009

I ended up doing a group portrait (or maybe a few), and I also made a plate of this wonderful piece of work by May Claerhout (1939–2016). She was a Belgian artist and made these amazing sculptures. This one sits in the courtyard of the Belgium National Archives; it’s called “The Birth of Man (La Naissance de l'Homme).

When I see this image and think about its narrative, I can’t help but think about Becker’s writing on “immortality projects.” In his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, he argues that “the basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death.” (Keen 1973). Becker suggested that a significant function of culture is to provide successful ways to engage in death denial.

Becker describes the human pursuit of “immortality projects” (or causa sui), in which we create or become part of something that we feel will outlast our time on earth. In doing so, we feel that we become heroic and part of something eternal that will never die, compared to the physical body that will eventually die. This gives human beings the belief that our lives have meaning, purpose, and significance in the grand scheme of things.

This is true for any piece of artwork, including books, buildings (especially those with names on them), building great wealth, or even having children. This is the human desire for immortality, literally or symbolically. It’s a very strong urge, and whether we admit it or not, we all participate. What purpose does it serve? As Becker said, it gives us meaning and purpose. When we feel that we have purpose and meaning in our lives, we feel psychologically secure; this quells death anxiety or existential dread. We need this to function every day.

Claerhout’s piece speaks to death anxiety in so many ways for me. The title alone is revealing. What does “The Birth of Man” imply? For me, it implies that the death of man is also waiting, silent, and hidden. Buried deep in the psychological bushes of our minds. There are five figures represented here—maybe symbolizing earth, air, fire, water, and spirit? I find it interesting that the top figure is stretching and reaching toward the heavens. This also symbolizes a type of immortality. It says that we’re not really going to die; we live on after this physical existence—literal immortality.

That belief has always been a great anxiety buffer—religion—but it comes with a lot of baggage and a heavy price (look at history and the role religion has played in death and suffering). In the 19th century, Nietzsche said, “God is dead.” And he goes on to say, “God remains dead. And we have killed him.“ This is often misquoted or misunderstood. What he meant was that humans had relied on religious beliefs for thousands or tens of thousands of years to quell death anxiety, and now technology and science have replaced them. Some say those are our new gods, and we rely on them as our ancestors relied on the religious gods. We’re always looking for cultural constructs to lean on to buffer our existential dread.