Anna Jacobson is a photographer who primarily works in Brooklyn, New York. Her photographs are primarily humorous interpretations of the American vernacular. She uses photography’s ability to turn the banal and the mundane into works of art by cropping them into a two dimensional rectangle and mounting them on a wall. It guides people towards the humor of everyday life. Most of the work is taken with 35mm or medium format color film.
Sales Pitch
Writing about my photographs makes me feel like I’m giving myself a lobotomy. And those went out of style in the 1950s. Not self-lobotomies. Lobotomies in general. I don’t know if self-lobotomies ever even existed.Well, some people actually think that taking antidepressants is like giving yourself a chemical lobotomy. But that debate sounds more exhausting than sticking an ice pick through my eye and poking around the frontal lobes of my brain. Maybe a lobotomy would jumble my brain enough to where I might make photographs that are a little easier to talk about. Or maybe I wouldn’t even make photographs anymore. I’d drop this art nonsense and become a salesman or something. Maybe then I could sell you on these photographs.
I don’t think life as a salesman would be so bad. Oh, but then after you’ve returned from yet another failed business trip, and with your recent car accident, your wife–lets call her Linda–starts to worry. Linda tries to get you to ask your boss–we will call him Howard–to allow you to work in town so that you don’t have to travel. When you ask Howard, he denies your plea for a stable lifestyle. A little nuts from the lobotomy, you lose your temper just a hair and end up fired. Apparently, you’re unfit to represent the company. And on top of all of this, your son, Biff, has yet to make anything of himself. But you can’t get too mad because of the time he came to visit you in Boston. The time he caught you having an affair with a receptionist on one of your sales trips. Did I mention Ben? He’s your brother and the man you’ve looked up to your entire life. He’s dead. But the two of you talk all the time. Ben is full of great ideas. He tells you to kill yourself so that your failure of a son can claim the insurance money. So you die. And of course, with all of your good fortune, your wife won’t even cry at your poorly attended funeral.
To view more of Anna’s work please visit her website.