Cutout 1, 2021
"It’s usually the first frame or the last frame that I end up using for my final edit. You can dance a little bit around it to see what else you can do, but I feel it’s never as strong or good as the first vision you had."
Rivers, puddles, and shards of glass. Metal spoons and empty bottles. With an eye for texture, layers and serenely saturated colors, Jessica Backhaus makes photographs that reflect the world back to us. “We grow, we change, we evolve,”Backhaus writes in the opening to her 2008 monograph,One Day in November. Bu twhile we move, the objects she photographs remain static, warmed by the mid-afternoon sun and preserved by the motion of time. Backhaus is not preoccupied by the sadness of the world around her, although the pictures she takes are often filled with broken, tangled, and abandoned items. Instead, like a philosopher focusing her gaze on the middle distance, Backhaus meditates on color, line, light and shadow.