PhotoForum #93: Second Son - Jacob Hamilton

Published by PhotoForum and Jacob Hamilton, December 2020

Photographs and design by Jacob Hamilton

Essay by Yvonne Shaw

Softcover, 277 x 190mm, 52 pages, 24 illustrations

Printed by Soar Print

ISSN 0111-0411

Second Son, by Jacob Hamilton is comprised of twenty-four images, which happens to match the age of the artist. However, the sequence of photographs was not determined by a number, rather it was an intuitive flow of landscapes and portraits and abstract images.

The synchronicity of numbers prompts Jacob to reflect on another coincidence; his arrival into this world on 4 May 1996, 90 years to the day after his great grandmother was born.

This photobook acts as a self-portrait of the artist, yet we don’t get a clear and unobstructed view of the person who wields the camera. We see him mostly via the landscapes that he inhabits. We understand him through the tools he utilises to bring us closer to his world. In one image we see a tripod in an elysian landscape. When I think of this image I feel as if I am standing with Jacob, looking at the place where he has just been. It almost seems as if there is a trace of the camera itself moving with him through space.

Jacob describes this place: “This image was taken between a main road and new housing development in Avondale (Auckland) close to where I live. I crossed a thick bed of vines and stepped over rubbish through the first layer of shrub and down a steep hill. The hiss of cars dissipating after passing the obstacles. Bird sound and a nearby stream amplifying as I began to breathe in the colder, fresher air. It started to feel like I had entered another time or place. Not Avondale or Auckland, but a place that had no name.”

Some of the images in Second Son are otherworldly. It was made in a challenging year. 2020: a year in which Jacob spent a lot of time in small rooms, as we all did, isolating ourselves in order to protect ourselves and our communities. However, unlike most of us – Jacob utilises this moment, seizing the ordinary gifts of the natural world and making new tools to create mysterious and unique documents of this extraordinary time.

This summer Jacob will be working towards a new body of work around family and lineage. He will visit his marae, Ngātira, where his koro grew up as a child with his parents and siblings.

(Extracted from the essay Close-up and from a distance by Yvonne Shaw that appears in the book).