Nick Jacobs has been a fixture in Cornwall, Conn., for many years. Never seen without his camera, he often bops around town with his manual portable typewriter in his Volvo station wagon. Speak with Nick for a moment and you’ll feel like you’ve been let into a new way of seeing the world. He has an appreciation for the absurd and the ironic, but is also deeply sensitive to the beautiful banalities of life. His subjects often seem basic: a vintage kitchen fan, the chrome typewriter handle reflecting sunshine, clouds, the top branches of a tree catching the late-day light, but the way Nick sees turns everything into works of art.
A new exhibit of his photographs at the Cornwall Library is an opportunity for us to view the world with new eyes. The show opened Feb. 26 and remains on display until April 9.
The images in this exhibit are predominantly landscapes taken in two places: the Coltsfoot Valley in Cornwall Village and under the concrete spandrel highway bridge that crosses the Housatonic River in Cornwall Bridge.
Like many Cornwall artists, Nick finds peace in the stunning nature of the region. He writes, “Often at sunset I walk in the Coltsfoot Valley … and I’ve shot many photos there, in sunshine and shadow and in the serpentine fogs that can roil their way slowly north from where they originate at the far end — very possibly the result of descending katabatic hillside winds.”
Jacobs has worked as a commercial photographer in New York City, with emphasis on fashion and jewelry; and, later in Connecticut as a garden and human interest photographer for White Flower Farm and various magazines.
He has worked as a photojournalist in Brazil, France, Ireland and Ukraine — photographing children suffering from the after-effects of the Chernobyl disaster. Locally, he has taught at the Brookfield Craft Center. He lives in Cornwall Bridge.
The name of this new show is “The Isles of Langerhans,” which is not actually a geographical region, rather a biological one. It’s where endocrine cells live in the pancreas, named for the German doctor who discovered them. As previously mentioned, Nick sees the world in a unique artistic way and decided to employ this poetic-sounding title for his “body” of images.
The show can be seen during library hours. To learn more, go to https://cornwalllibrary.org.
