Artist Statement
Charles River Dam Locks is a work-in-progress handmade accordion book of photographic cyanotype prints that reflects on the passage of time by paying close attention to a small space over a short period of time. The photographs are spaced equally in time, a few seconds apart, showing the reflection of the sun in the polluted waters of the locks. From image to image, the texture of the water appears at first consistent, but on closer inspection, the highlights on the water shapeshift dramatically, and detritus and an oil slick inches outward and across the frame, flowing from the river toward Boston Harbor. On the reverse of each page the same frame is printed in mirror image, but more faintly, as though the print had bled completely through the page, or as though the page itself had the transparency of the murky river water.
The inconsistencies of the paper coating and printing process cause the prints themselves to ripple in and out of sharpness. The blue of the cyanotype process connects the prints to the water they depict. In one direction, the book reads sequentially in time, while held from the other side, the mirror-image frames flow backward in time. The accordion format also allows it to be displayed circularly. Folded, the book is 4.5″x5.5″. Unfolded, the dimensions of the book are currently 4.5″ x 92″. Completed, I hope to make a version that, at full extension, will have a length of approximately 30 feet.
Artist Bio
Jacob Geiger is a Cambridge-based photographer interested in how the camera can reflect and shape how we conceptualize our position within time and the natural world. Jacob was raised in Tennessee, but came to Massachusetts by way of California, where he worked as a software developer after receiving an undergraduate degree in computer science from Yale University. He received a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from MassArt. He is an arts instructor and studio manager at MIT and an adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.