Bill Jacobson Portrait Photography

Bill Jacobson uses the medium of photography to capture not just people and places, but emotion and metaphor. He is known for his blurry, out-of-focus black-and-white photographs that seem to depict memories rather than direct representations of figures and forms. Through the use of light, framing and composition, Jacobson creates haunting yet poetic images.

Jacobson was born in Connecticut in 1955. He graduated with a BA from Brown University in 1977 and earned his MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1982. For the next several years, Jacobson took a break from taking photographs and shifted to collecting them. He felt that he needed to forget what he had learned in school. He visited flea markets and acquired hundreds of old photographs, captivated by their diffuse quality and sense of fleeting time.

Jacobson stepped back behind the camera in 1989, producing a series of photographs featuring pale and shadowy figures. The powerful images evoked the loss experienced during the AIDS epidemic and cemented Jacobson as an important figure in the burgeoning LGBTQ rights movement. Throughout the 1990s, Jacobson continued to shoot defocused figures in monochromatic lighting as a commentary on the flow of life.

In 1999, Jacobson returned home to New York from a trip to India with a fresh perspective. He became enamored with color and the movement of people through public spaces. Jacobson took his camera and a tripod to the city streets to create color photographs of the crowds, the light and the architecture.

In the mid-2000s, he began a foray into landscape photography with a focus on the perception of the horizon.

Jacobson’s work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He continues to exhibit across the United States.

On 1stDibs, find Bill Jacobson’s photography, prints and more.