The Last Waltz, The Last Show, The Last Roll: all are tributes to the end of an era. For Jeff Jacobson, The Last Roll represented the end of airiness. His life was never in question, but from that day onward, he lived in defiance of death. Life was not linear anymore but rather cyclical as nature, in an effort to bloom again. Dedicated to his wife Marnie Andrews, this intimate story is not one of individual struggle but of a shared one. Marnie’s poem is a break in this fog of images, which Kodachrome’s grainy texture gives the dimension of a dream. “…the bushes wave their first seed pods, (I could swear they were waving, laughing at us,) ‘We’re coming. This cold will end.’” Her words echo Jacobson’s photographs, their grace capturing the delicate and familiar movement of nature. The characteristics of Kodachrome are strangely appropriate in this context. After recovering from cancer, Jacobson learned that Kodachrome, which had defined his vision as a photographer, would no longer be produced. He filled his refrigerator with as many films as he could and photographed time passing and leaving its mark on his body and his films. Conceived from 2005 to 2010, this work is a collection of mundane details endowed with significance and poetry. Nature plays an important part. Through its pages, mankind appears at first as a synecdoche, a shadow, a sculpture, gradually appearing more and more. This work is both a tribute to Kodachrome and to life, ending metaphorically with two series of images reproducing the spectrum of light: red, blue, green, red, blue, green.
Laurence Cornet
« The Last Roll »
Photographs by Jeff Jacobson
Daylight Books
116 pages
39,95 dollars
