Jacob Howard

Project details

Project

Various

Year

2011-2020

Category

Interview, Photography

The master’s degree in Graphic Design did not prevent Jacob Howard from dedicating to photography. Oscillating in focus and artistic style, always maintains certain characteristics based on the time of the shooting: “isolation, silence and unease.”

The New Zealand photographer reveals that the project that dictated a very important artistic shift was Distant, in 2014. It was responsible for a greater concern with the landscape and the dimension it assumes when photographed, superimposing an impotent human character: “What interested me from a story telling point of view, was how the overwhelming scale and beauty of the natural environment impacted me, the distant spectator, and the people that exist within it. A place where the landscape exhales a sacred nature where man is a mere figurehead.”

Distant was able to influence other collections, such as Descent and The otherside, which revealed an important reflection regarding the anthropic agility of, with tied hands, contemplating what is imposed on us, either by the grandeur or the unavoidable beauty.

Distant

Distant

Descent

The Other Side

Descent

In another chapter, there is a curiosity about the Gothic that surrounds his hometown, thus, Jacob worked the angle and the atmospheric conditions in order to transform what he always considered a familiar environment into a mysterious one. In order to do so, tries to present the landscape as a living being, following for that same reason an artistic philosophy similar to the one in portrait photography: “I wanted to try and capture the soul of the landscape, the same way you might try to capture the soul of somebody through a portrait, seeing the land as a living and breathing thing. I was so intrigued by fog watching it roll in and roll out, inhaling and exhaling. For me they weren’t just landscapes but something more.”