Arthur E. Jacoby
Arthur E. Jacoby is an artist photographer whose work uses intentional camera movement, double exposures, infrared photography, and post-processing to reframe the photographic image. Rather than treating the camera as a neutral recorder of a scene, he uses its limitations as a starting point for work about perception, memory, and the feeling of a transient moment.
Jacoby grew up in a household where music, books, museums, photographs, and home movies were part of daily life. His father played violin and regularly documented family events and travel through photography and film; his mother played piano. Jacoby’s own interest in photography began in Cub Scouts, where he made his first contact prints.
Although he did not pursue formal photographic training, he has studied the medium over many years through photography magazines, books, workshops, and classes. A more recent turning point came through his membership in The Art of Photography International and mentorship with Jack Wild. That experience, he says, helped him develop as an artist photographer.
The central question in Jacoby’s practice concerns the gap between sight and photography. A camera has a more limited range of color and tone than the human eye, and a photograph records only a narrow instant. Human perception, by contrast, is always selecting, editing, and interpreting. His work begins from that difference.
He aims to communicate the essence of what he experienced when he pressed the shutter, rather than simply reproduce what was in front of the lens. Intentional camera movement is one of his principal methods. Movement introduces abstraction, blur, and shifts in light that can make an image register more like an impression than a document.
Double exposure and infrared techniques extend that approach, while digital editing allows him to refine the work once he returns to the computer. Jacoby removes most of the images he makes before focusing on a small number that can be developed through Photoshop and other programs. The process is selective from beginning to end.
His working method starts with attention. “Stop and look and look,” he says. When something catches his eye, he tries to identify what prompted the response: a particular light condition, gesture, motion, or atmosphere. He then photographs multiple perspectives, exposures, and movements to test how the scene can be translated through the camera.
This approach also informs his photographs of musical performances. In those settings, Jacoby is less concerned with creating a conventional concert image than with registering what he feels an artist is communicating to an audience. The goal is to find a visual equivalent for the experience of listening.
Jacoby’s work is guided by the idea that life is not static. Significant experiences are often remembered through impressions and feelings rather than through a stable, complete image. His photographs use the medium’s capacity for distortion and transformation to address that instability directly.
He measures success through attention. A work succeeds when a viewer pauses, looks closely, and considers what they are seeing. That exchange between artist and viewer is essential to his understanding of creative work, which he sees as dependent on communication, shared vision, and ongoing learning.
Looking ahead, Jacoby plans to work with people engaged in political and social issues, including environmental concerns, hunger, voting rights, and homelessness. He intends to create images that communicate the lived experiences connected to those issues.
His advice to people who do not think of themselves as creative is straightforward: try anyway. Failure is part of learning, and the process of making, revising, and trying again is how a practice develops.
