In this new exhibition, each photograph appears like a reminiscence

Daniel Arnold, Jerry Hsu, Jingyu Lin, Heather Sten, Rosie Marks, Adam Powell, Samone Kidane and Caroline Tompkins are simply a few of those that’ve contributed work to Breathless in Glowing Air, with a view to seize the subtleties of Pomegranate’s universe: one that’s open-ended, optimistic and delightful. In Jesse’s personal phrases, the present is ​“a suggestion of another world being possible”.

Why placed on the exhibition in London? Well, why not. ​“I really wanted this show to be a love letter to contemporary photography and I thought the most honest way to do that was to extend beyond [photographers whose work I’ve published before],” Jesse says. ​“I wanted to showcase people I have worked with and uplift them, but not every photographer I admire is in a place to make a book or they’ve already made a book, so this felt like a great way to introduce the idea of working on something together, and for them to see their work through my curatorial lens in a way they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.”

Said ​“curatorial lens” precedes Jesse. Kyle Berger, a Canadian photographer whose photobook Twenty Four Hour Fantasy was printed by Pomegranate in 2020, says: ​“He has a particular outlook on life that I find quite craveable.” In reference to the Pomegranate-shaped ​“universe” Jesse has created: ​“It’s one of intentional whimsy and romantic simplicity. There is a dreamy quality in the images highlighted by Pomegranate; they feel warm, hazy, and evocative, like tokens of a memory.” The exhibition’s title, Breathless in Glowing Air, lends itself properly to what Kyle describes.

​“The collection of photographs [in the show] is about the endlessness of discovery,” Jesse says. ​“I tried to think of a phrase that might encapsulate what that feeling could sound like or could be quantified as. At least in my mind, there’s something about the experience [of seeing all these works in one place] that kind of stops you in your tracks, changes the texture of the atmosphere around you, and forces a sort of pause.”