Rerun: Book Review: Contact by Jake Shivery
Jake Shivery, Contact
by George Slade
The camera salesman Mr. J. Shivery reveals his meditations on vision and community in this eloquent commingling of first-person text and second-person imagery. Contact, the book’s title, assumes both literal and metaphoric implications. Literal, in the sense of contact sheets: these pages reproduce 8x10 inch negatives, the photographer’s choice medium, at a 1:1 ratio. Metaphoric, in the extraordinary way in which his vision contacts spiritual essence that speaks of both individual and communal truths. Qualities of place and relationship flow between people, photographer, and final image.
To label the work in Contact portraiture is too flat an assessment. One of the photographer’s dreams, recounted in his soul-baring, modestly profound afterword, described a large-format lens that has abandoned precise measurement and quantities in favor of symbolic suggestion. For me, this imagined instrument called to mind the alethiometer of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series—a mechanical instrument that utilizes intuition and insight to construct a truth educed from images. Which seems an apt characterization of the artist Jake Shivery’s oneiric, radiant records of singular individuals, including himself, in his Pacific Northwest realm.
(And I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn that Daisy, the hobbling black labrador, was in fact Jake’s daemon.)
—George Slade, re:photographica, and executive director, TC Photo, Minneapolis, Minnesota
9x12 inches
160 pgs.
57 plates + 36 additional images
Perfect bound, foil embossed cover
ISBN: 978-0-9844432-7-7
Limited Edition of 1,000
Introduction by Dr. Julian Nelson
Contact, which includes photos CNN said “show affection for Portland area [and its] residents,” presents Shivery’s 8×10 contact prints captured on his large format Deardorff camera. It’s a 160-page, limited-edition book separated into sections highlighting approximately 100 images by the artist, and an extensive essay on his photographic beliefs and process. Produced and printed in Portland Ore. Visit Jakeshivery.com for more on the artist and his work.
Jake Shivery's body of work is an earnest, honest, and admiring catalog of the North Portland neighborhood where he lives and works. What starts out as a simple concept—the photographs of loved ones in a common setting—becomes something much grander: a beautiful and thoughtful collection of souls ready for viewing. Working with an 8x10 film camera and printing in contact sheet form, Jake's tools and approach are less about capturing a moment as they are about capturing a mood and a life. His photographs are haunting, intimate, and layered with pieces of visual narration that together tell the story of both the subject and the artist.
This book is a bit more than a photo book, because Jake is a bit more than a photographer. When looking at one of his photographs, one feels a sense of a story. The narrative lens through which Jake views the world is due in part to his background as a writer, and thanks to his second talent this book will also contain an extensive and inspiring essay on photography as a practice and as a subject. The essay is both enamored with and incensed by the world of photography: Jake's honest and thoughtful account of his decades of photographic experience rings with a refreshing tone of truth.
While he is well-known among the Portland photography community, he has yet to make a mark on a nation-wide audience, making him the perfect first subject for One Twelve Publishing's series of featured artists. These artists, like Jake, have the work and the experience behind them to present a new and fresh view on the photographic world; all they've lacked is the publishing representation. With the added support of One Twelve Publishing's pre-existing and future viewership, they will finally have the opportunity to engage with the greater art world in the way that they need in order to continue on with their photographic careers.