Jacob Geiger

MFA ’21 Photography

The photograph promises to exceed the limits of our perception: in the minute particulars it captures by chance in each frame, in the duration of attention it allows us to pay individual moments, in the way it can order our vision and resolve it into a singular frame. In these images, I put these promises in tension with the density of the scene: the way the overgrowth is flattened in the frame into a profusion of detail, of light working its way through layers of translucency and opacity. The natural orders of this space push up against the rectilinear order of human development. The interconnected life imperatives for water and air and light revolt against the straight lines of the photograph’s boundaries and of the spaces of urban and suburban life just outside its frame.

I am pursuing a vision of the landscape that favors attention to dense fields rather than sweeping views, and whose pacing references geological rather than anthropogenic time. I propose images where the viewer is small in relation to an ungraspable and unconstrained space, where the photograph does not resolve the space into rectilinear order. Mediated through the camera and projector and projected flattened and silvery onto these fractured surfaces, the images meander like the flow of a river, requesting a slow encounter where I may, in Robert Irwin’s words, perceive my own perception.



Jacob Geiger (b. 1993) was born in New Haven, CT and lived in Memphis, Tennessee, and San Francisco, California, before arriving in Boston in 2019. He received a BS in computer science and mathematics from Yale University. He works in photography and installation, addressing fictions of control in the relationship between people and their environments.

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