Bill Jacobson has been making photographs for more than 50 years. While his methods have varied, the work is joined by underlying concerns with memory, perception, and the subtle dialogue between absence and presence.
Since his 1993 solo show at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, he has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe, and his work has been collected by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Brooklyn Museum, The Nelson-Atkins Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, John Paul Getty Museum, and many others.
Jacobson received a 2012 grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and previously was awarded grants from the Aaron Siskind Foundation and New York Foundation for the Arts. In addition to MacDowell, he has attended Yaddo, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, and the Edward Albee Foundation.
Seven monographs have been published of Jacobson's work, and new books are forthcoming from Yale Center for British Art and Some Planes Press. One of his books, Place (Series), was published in 2015 by Radius Books and includes a poem by MacDowell Fellow Maureen N. McLane.
During his MacDowell Fellowships, Jacobson has printed a portfolio of black and white images from a trip to India; worked on color photographs; begun series of landscape and still life photographs; worked on a series about planar surfaces and their intersection with the asymmetry of nature; completed a series of photographs which addressed relationships between the body, the natural landscape, and the edge of the picture frame; and reprinted his negatives from 1975-1978 for an exhibition at Exile in Berlin – many of the works made at MacDowell have gone on to be shown at the Julie Saul Gallery in New York.
During his 2024 residency, Jacobson developed two ongoing, adjacent photographic projects. For "Some People That I Talk To," he made highly detailed, closeup portraits of fellow residents, as well others he came into contact with during his stay. He also continued an ongoing series called "Background Studies," which are comprised of defocused landscape images. Both were done using an analog 8 x 10 view camera and black and white film. In addition, Jacobson worked on the designs for two upcoming monographs: when is a place, published by Some Planes Press, and 1080 Chapel Street, published by Yale Center for British Art.
