Capturing the Central Valley on Movie

The highway to Kam Jacoby’s present retrospective has taken him by means of superior levels in printmaking, graphic design, and an MFA in pictures. He thinks about images rather a lot and works onerous on the picture making course of. He makes use of quite a lot of cameras, each movie and digital, and prints, mounts, or mats, many of the pictures himself.

Along the way in which, he labored as a photograph lab tech, taught artwork at an area highschool, and pictures at a number of schools, together with Allan Hancock in Santa Maria. “Teaching has provided me … a degree of freedom to pursue whatever [photographic] ideas capture my attention,” he says.

One of these concepts is a choice of 12 prints, titled “Central Valley,” which he began in 2023. His plan was for a solo journey although 30 of the Valley’s small and large cities, utilizing Route 99 as a place to begin. “Just me and the camera. I didn’t really know what I was going to shoot,” he stated.

He labored on the challenge for greater than a yr. It quickly revealed itself as a variety of high-definition frontal portraits of one- and two-story deserted business buildings, every softened by their very own light pastel shades of pink, violet, yellow, and blue. So forgotten are these buildings that even graffiti artists have handed them by. Amazingly, the pictures all seem to have been taken on the identical day, about the identical time, with the identical shadows, blue sky, and white clouds. 

“There aren’t a lot of people in my photographs, but they’re all about people,” stated Jacoby. The Central Valley buildings had Jacoby asking himself what their historical past was, what sort of companies had occupied the areas, and what occurred to those that owned them, “… all the iterations of their life cycle.” He discovered them oddly lovely. 

One of probably the most haunting collection is from Jacoby’s 2009 e-book Layers: Composite Photographs from the Lompoc Valley, every print a historic black and white scene of the previous blended with a contemporary model in shade.

At the middle of a 1910 view of a modest, one-story Victorian house is a younger, smiling lady dressed within the type of the day. Lucy Bendasher stands in entrance of her mom’s home, outdoors a low picket gate someplace on the western fringe of Lompoc. Subtle hues of the now deserted and deteriorating home bleed out and in. 

Bendasher’s proper hand holds her broad hat firmly on high of her head as she leans into a chilly wind. The remainder of the panorama is Jacoby’s world set in flat agricultural fields that broaden in limitless instructions. An empty highway to the left disappears into the distant horizon, the one companions just a few PG&E energy poles and wind broken cypress bushes, all underneath a cloudless and vibrant cobalt sky. 

“I try to imagine the original scene: what the weather was like, what sounds were in the air, what people were thinking and feeling,” writes Jacoby. He compares the historic images to sound, a “… possibility of being able to listen to the history of a place etched in the walls,” a perspective that “has resonated in my work and the way I think about photographs.” 

The undercurrents within the retrospective are easy observations of unusual locations, individuals, and issues that we usually move over in our every day lives. “Things that don’t jump out but are worthy of our attention,” Jacoby says. 

An instance of that’s the Lompoc Journal collection taken on the town’s streets and alleyways. Jacoby describes the “imagery and emotion [that] are more reflective of my own feelings and my experiences growing up in Lompoc.” These are topics he muses “are not traditionally beautiful pictures but give a specific sense of place” and “my experience of the city, not a Chamber of Commerce version.”

So Far: Selected Works by Kam Jacoby is on view at Elverhøj Museum of History and Art, 1624 Elverhoy Way, Solvang, by means of January 11, 2026. elverhoj.org