Jacob Church
MFA ’25 Photography
In my photographs of American towns, I seek to pose questions about the complicated relationship between community and individuals. I look at how our built environment serves as a sort of language, communicating at once a community’s values, desires, and sometimes disenfranchisement. Defined in part by my identity as a working class American, I use the camera as a tool to evaluate my relationship to American histories and beliefs.
My ongoing project Loon integrates observation and memoir. Photographing in New England, I trace recollections of my childhood against the contemporary condition of a region widely associated with early American history. I see the state of things on the surfaces of buildings, painted on cars, and in the faces of strangers on the street. This work is about a kind of harmony where mundane places, people, and things radiate a similar melancholic bliss. If there is a through line or a certain kind of beauty, it’s one of love tethered to discontent, tenderness in rough places, and unconscious longing.
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Jacob Church is a photographer born in Bowling Green, Ohio. Shot on film, Church’s images are exposed and kept in the dark for sometime, creating space between the fiction of the occurrence as it lives in his memory and the fact of the latent image. His work has been exhibited at Panopticon gallery in Boston, MA and at La Grange in Vers Pont du Gard, France. His photographs have been featured in Pearl Press, Oranbeg Press, Lenscratch, and Fotofilmic.
