ROCKFORD ART MUSEUM | COLLECTION | PHOTOGRAPHY

Joseph Jachna

Between the summers of 1969 and 1970, armed with only a wide angle camera lens, a host of optical lenses and mirrors and his own body, Joseph Jachna created series of photographs that broke traditional boundaries of what a landscape was supposed to be. In an era, before digital cameras and Photoshop, he radically manipulated and distorted what the camera recorded.

In traditional landscape photography, there are those typified by Ansel Adams, a careful observer seeking to capture the majestic granduer revealed in the mountains and trees. Then there are those such as Brett Weston, whose hand in the work is much more apparent. Harry Callahan (one of Jachna's professors) and Bill Brandt had been experimenting with the human figure in the landscape. Bill Brandt had even begun using a wide angle lens.

In a similar vein, Jachna, during his first summer out in Door County, brought along a model to photograph in the landscape. However, the real break through came when he put his fist up in the photograph with the model. The distortion of the wide angle lens and the unexpectedness of its appearance makes the fist appear sculptural. In this first summer, he experimented with introducing his arms, hands, feet and shadow in the prairie landscape producing some profound photographs and some that were equally bizarre.

Over the winter, Jachna collected mirrors and optical lenses and he unleashed them the following summer in Door County. The mirrors and lenses distort the landscape introducing clouds into water well, a monotone stripe of summer sky through the prairie or extending the stones of an old foundation in new direction. Very often, Jachna left his hand in as part of the composition, sometimes acting in its sculptural role, but always as an intrusion by the artist into the photograph and therefore making his intrusion into his surroundings obvious.

In his earlier work, Jachna would often times create a “natural composition,” an egg on a bone for instance in Egg Over Bone, 1968, a composition that is improbable but not impossible in nature. Of the Door County series, this is perhaps one of the most significant aspects of their creation. The artist is not standing back as an impartial viewer. The artist exists and his hand can be seen (quite literally) interacting with the landscape.