Untitled RSM 174038

untitled (Ranch Santa Margarita, CA 04-03-14) copyright Douglas Stockdale – 

I am always amazed as how one one thing seems to lead to another. I have been a fan of Bill Jacobson’s photographs and I curated his photobook A Series of Human Decisions into the recent 10×10 American Photobooks exhibition in Tokyo last year. Prior to this book, Jacobson has completed a series of somewhat related photographs since 1987 but noted for the fact that the photographs were purposefully out of focus, see image from his earlier book Photographs (below).

So while we were having dinner at a local pizza pub, I decided to photograph a person sitting at the adjacent bar. When I went to zoom in with my Samsung camera-phone for a tighter composition, the magnification in conjunction with the low light was a challenge and while the camera-phone was just trying to auto-focus, I made an exposure, above. A Jacobson moment.

An impressionist and ambiguous image, with shapes, color and mass that hint at something that seems tangible. Subsequently I have found this effect hard to duplicate with the camera-phone and much easier to obtain the same effect with a manual focusing camera/lens.

Cheers!

Doug

Bill Jacobson Photographs copyright  2005 published by Hatje Cantz