Bill Jacobson at Spritz3000

Bill Jacobson
(b. 1955) based in New York, New York

Analog gelatin silver print mounted to museum board and framed
print, 16 × 20 in.; board, 23 3/4 × 27 3/4 in.
Edition 1 of 7 + 2 AP

Bill Jacobson’s when is place #402 shows the darkened trunk of a tree rising in soft focus against an open field and distant woods. Its silhouette interrupts the horizon, yet its edges blur so that figure and ground nearly dissolve into one another. The photograph transforms the landscape into an imprint, more memory than record, suggesting the instability of perception itself. By numbering rather than naming his works, Jacobson underscores their serial nature, resisting narrative closure and emphasizing photography as process. In this way, the work reflects his enduring exploration of impermanence and the fragile ways place is continually remade through seeing.

Analog gelatin silver print mounted to museum board and framed
print, 16 × 20 in.; board, 23 3/4 × 27 3/4 in.
Edition 2 of 7 + 2 AP

Bill Jacobson’s when is place #448 depicts a hillside rolling beneath a pale sky, its contours softened into atmospheric gradients of gray. The horizon bends gently, bordered by shadow and foliage, but no detail fully resolves. Instead, the scene hovers like a recollection, a fragment drawn from memory rather than fixed in time. Jacobson’s decision to title his photographs with sequential numbers avoids descriptive cues, shifting attention away from subject matter toward perception itself. As throughout his practice, defocusing and serial numbering together highlight the instability of vision and ways in which photography mediates both memory and place.

Chromogenic print mounted on museum board and framed
print, 20 × 22 in.; board, 28 × 30 in.
Edition 7 of 9 + 2 AP

Bill Jacobson’s (Untitled) #3591 portrays a road extending toward the horizon, its surface and edges dissolved into soft haze so that landscape becomes atmosphere rather than record. The image resists legibility, foregrounding photography’s capacity to evoke uncertainty and impermanence. Numbered sequentially within Jacobson’s Untitled series (1999–2001), the photograph belongs to a vast body of work that privileges accumulation over singularity. The numerical title avoids description, insisting on continuity across the series and echoing his later when is place photographs. Together, these strategies define Jacobson’s sustained inquiry into the instability of vision and the shifting ways photography shapes our sense of place.

Bill Jacobson (b. 1955, Norwich, Connecticut) is a photographer whose work probes memory, perception, and the experience of time. He first came to prominence in the 1990s with a series of out-of-focus portraits and landscapes that evoke themes of absence, longing, and impermanence. Beginning in 2005, and up until the start of his recent when is a place, Jacobson’s practice shifted toward sharply rendered imagery, most notably in his Place (Series) photographs, which distill architectural and built environments into formal, geometric compositions that suggest both intimacy and distance. His practice spans portraiture, landscape, and abstraction, consistently returning to questions about how we inhabit space—both physically and emotionally. Jacobson’s photographs have been exhibited internationally and are held in numerous public collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Recent exhibitions include when is a place, Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin; Queer Lens, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and Luna Cornea, Centro de la imagen, Mexico City. He lives and works in New York City.