Biography:
I am a photographer born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. I hold a BA in Art & The History of Art from Amherst College and a MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. I currently teach in a tenure-track role at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My position is Assistant Professor of Photography: Race, Representation, and Critical Practice. In this role I serve both undergraduate students and the newly formed Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA program.
Artist Statement:
My photography engages historic Black memory through objects, landscape, and portraiture. My practice is a visual exploration of haunting. For five years I photographed within the preserved spaces of my ancestors and fictive kin (African, European, and Indigenous peoples who collided in 17th century New England) to activate this temporality. My recent work has shifted to an object focused study of the material practices of my nuclear family.
My method is built through a combination of photographic documentation and critical fabulation, coined by cultural historian Saidiya Hartman, as a wrestling of facts and silences to “imagine what cannot be verified ... and to reckon with the precarious lives [of the enslaved] which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance.” (Hartman, Venus In Two Acts, 2008)
I retouch the homes, workplaces, and landscape of my ancestors and living family to showcase the recursive nature of time. I figure and investigate the afterlife of slavery through the somatic and haptic quality of the photograph. I work with, through, and for Blackness to rupture silences enforced by colonial archives.
Contact:
Email: jjacks11(at)ucsc.edu
Instagram: @_jmjackson