Lucien Jacobs is an artist and photographer currently working in Santa Cruz, California. His work explores a variety of themes, from everyday scenes, the glanced-over and mysterious, to personal and the ever changing self. Mood, mindset, metaphor and Lucien’s own way of viewing the world all infuse the work. His photography projects have resulted in two self-published books, Complication and Tensile. In both of these works the artist started to break with the rigid compositions and photographic techniques he learned from others. Photographic rules were broken and a distinct vision began to form, one that contained elements of metaphor and a strong poetic relationship between image sequences. Currently he is pursuing a degree in environmental science and art at UCSC.
In my work Landscape (2021-), I am interested in the human role in shaping and altering nearly every aspect of their environment. What is the constructed environment? What is natural growth? Where do these concepts begin, end, and overlap? And what does their overlap look like? My work in this project attempts to address these questions and others.
As a medium, photography is well suited to this task. The images in this work often contain complex symbolism and subtle metaphor, as well as feeling that would be difficult to express through written word alone. Be it landscape as a stage or backdrop for human constructions on display, in many cases the objects are self-referential to their surroundings; landscape that is contained, hidden, blocked by constructed barriers, fences, gates, containers, each working to either outline or obscure; landscapes which serve as funeral mounds for human built wreckage and the skeletons of objects; landscapes that are marred by the passage of people through them. Relationships between objects and their environment are complicated. The pure landscape, not influenced or altered by humanity, no longer exists.
Each image hints at and probes similar fundamental questions, but often in different context, with new understanding, and changing points of focus. There is no blame to be assigned, no wrongs that the images seek to right. Only the visual document of a photograph to begin discussion and help me to understand the ever complex world around me.