EP 012: GIDEON JACOBS

Image Culture

My guest is Gideon Jacobs. In 2016 Gideon staged a social media performance piece in which he went on a month long virtual road trip from New York to California. Using other people’s photographs geotagged to his corresponding itinerary and writing fictitious captions that recounted his days spent on the road, he built an extended narrative capturing an acute feeling of self discovery. Of course, none of it really happened. Gideon writes that the work might remind us that we don’t just go places and photograph what happens, but what happens is a function of what we photograph. Gideon’s work exists at the intersection of writing, art, and performance, but what connects the disparate parts of his practice is a continual preoccupation with narrative, with the ways it can seduce, inform, and mislead. This has a lot to do with photography, something that’s always been central to Gideon’s work. He formerly served as Creative Director of the storied photojournalism agency Magnum Photos, and regularly contributes writing on photography to publications such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, VICE, and Bomb Magazine. His fiction, much like the writing in #INSTAROADTRIP2016 is highly experimental, often manifesting in extremely short works that can be read on a single page or screen. It’s a way, he says, of pushing back against more established modes of writing and tailoring work for a new kind of consumption. It’s through thinking about the ways we’ve built narratives in the past, either through photography or the written word, that Jacobs finds new ways to consider how narrative functions today.

You can see more of Gideon’s work at http://www.gideon.works/ and you can see my portrait of Gideon at home on Instagram @william.jess.laird @image.culture or at www.williamjesslaird.com/imageculture