Join us for the FREE closing reception of Marcus Jackson’s solo photography show “Street Portraits” with entertainment provided by The Ted Harris Quartet, an Athens-based jazz ensemble.

Preview and purchase his work.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Making a photograph involves finding ways in which a fixed frame can house the complex intersections between light and shadow, stillness and movement, proximity and distance, the solitary and the civic, mortality and the metamorphosis of time. Being African American can mean surviving the crossroads between history’s severities and the future’s indeterminate pliability.

As an African American photographer, I prioritize making space for the moments and the people whose essences represent the ongoing interplay between history, society, and the individual soul. While making portraits in public places with natural or available light and choosing subjects who are in motion or going about their daily lives, I invite the resonant exchanges among social circumstances and private consciousness and emotion.

Throughout 2020, 2021, and 2022, because of—among other conditions and events—the pandemic’s highlighting of economic and healthcare inequities, and continued violence by police against unarmed BIPOC community members, the dynamics of communal and personal existence for Black and Brown people have intensified, revealing new challenges and depths to our grief and our brilliance. Walking about city streets with a camera and a prime lens, I am attempting to portray the unfolding nuances of people’s insistence on truth and beauty.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Marcus Jackson is a poet and photographer who studied in NYU’s graduate creative writing program and as a Cave Canem fellow. His poems and photographs have appeared in such publications as The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. His second book of poems, entitled Pardon My Heart (Northwestern University Press/TriQuarterly Books), was released in 2018. Of Pardon My Heart, Jeff Gordinier for The New York Times writes, “Jackson’s collection confirms the arrival of a thrilling new voice in American poetry, one whose writing, on page after page, has the fullness and glow of a jubilee.” Jackson’s forthcoming photography monograph of street portraits is slated for publication in 2024. Jackson lives with his wife and child in Columbus, Ohio, and he teaches in the MFA program at Ohio State.