Dead Photographer of the Moment: Introducing a new feature on www.nyip.com

The world is full of photographers, and it's not unusual to be asked, "Have you heard of this-or-that photographer?" and the answer is, many times, "No." There are lots of great photographers out there, and it's always a wonderful surprise to discover someone whose work you really like, but whose name you've never heard before.

In the quest to get your work out there, living photographers have one great advantage, namely that we're still around to promote ourselves. Build that Website, use paid search advertising. Tweet away!

But what of those who've made the trip to the ultimate darkroom? Some have work that that's made it onto gallery walls, or into the history of photography books. But there are a lot of great photographers — some famous and many not — who have passed away, but whose work deserves to be remembered, studied, and showcased.

Dead Photographer of the Moment is designed to do exactly that: Bring to our readers' attention the life and work of an interesting photographer whose picture-taking days are over. In the coming months, we'll profile the work of photographers of note, both the famous and the not-so-famous, whose work we think merits the attention of all photographers.

Marcey Jacobson

by NYI Director Chuck DeLaney

While I don't get to spend as much time every day with the New York Times as I would like, my first stop is generally the obituary page. Hardly a day goes by that there isn't an interesting person profiled there, and I've often contended that if you're hard pressed to come up with an idea for a photography self-assignment, the lives of the recently departed that are profiled in the Times will often provide an interesting idea or two.

On August 11, the Times ran a large obituary of a photographer whose name I had never heard — Marcey Jacobson. The first sentence of the article, written by Bruce Weber, covered all the basic facts — the who, what, when and where of journalism: "Marcey Jacobson, a self-taught photographer from New York City who spent decades in the southern Mexican highlands documenting the lives of the indigenous Indian peoples, died on July 26 in San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico, in the state of Chiapas."

Reading the article with interest — I've visited Mexico many times and enjoyed taking photographs there — I learned that Ms. Jacobson was not only self-taught, but that she'd turned to photography rather late in life, in her mid-forties, after discovering San Cristobal, which she initially planned to visit for a short stay but soon deemed the place "the solution to everything" and moved there with her partner, a painter named Janet Marren.

At the time of her passing, the 97-year-old Ms. Jacobson was working on a new exhibit of her work, which created (and preserved) a wonderful documentation of the life of the Mayan Indians who are the dominant population in the highlands of Chiapas province in Southern Mexico in the middle of the last century.

Jacobson's work came to the general public's eye relatively recently, boosted by a book of her photographs, "The Burden of Time," published in 2001 by Stanford University Press.

To learn more details, read the Times' obituary.

A few days after her passing, the Times' lens blog took note of Jacobson's death, displaying a gallery of her work that's well worth looking at. I suggest you take the time to read the comments from people who knew the photographer that appear at the end of the blog piece. They round out a profile of this woman for those of us who never had the pleasure of making her acquaintance.

So, what ideas come from Ms. Jacobson's life as set forth in her obituary?

For one: The ease-of-entry into photography in middle age that Ms. Jacobson enjoyed.

You want a career in ballet or ice hockey? Start young. It's never too late, however, to take up the camera. While Ms. Jacobson is the subject here, it's hard not to be reminded of 19th Century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), who took up photography in her late 40s after receiving a camera as a present from her daughter. Unlike Ms. Jacobson's life path, Cameron had raised six children prior to starting her career in photography.

For a second: Find a place and document it.That's one of the best self-assignments possible.

Don't just wander through the place like a tourist, but really put in the time to live there, meet the people, and mark time in the fashion they do. It may be that you'll record something extraordinary, such as the lives of the Mayan Indians that populate Jacobson's photographs. It's hard to know when modern social forces, or disaster or dictatorships will cause a place of a given time to disappear forever, but it sometimes happens, and that kind of photographic record is invaluable for humans going forward. The photographer Roman Vishniac, (1897ñ1990) often cited for the scientific and microscopic photographs of his later career, created a remarkable collection of work earlier in his life recording the Jewish ghettos of Poland in the 1930s, places that disappeared in the following decade in the Holocaust. Vishniac's work from this period was published in the 1980s in book form, "A Vanished World".

The place you choose doesn't have to be in the mountains of southern Mexico or Eastern Europe. We can't all run off to Polynesia like painter Paul Gauguin. It might make more sense to follow Voltaire's advice in Candide and "cultivate your own garden." It could be the local courthouse, or shopping mall, or high school. Look for a sense of community, and perhaps a place that's likely facing a transition. The photographs you take will become part of history in some manner, as Jacobson's have.

For a third: Photograph in Mexico.

It's beautiful. It's as varied as the United States in terms of regions and topography. There's a special feeling to the light. It's a country with a bright future and a rich tradition. There are Indian tribes that don't speak Spanish, and seaside resorts that were just spits of sand a few decades ago. While it may not be "the solution to everything" for you as it was for Jacobson, it's been captivating photographers for many years.

While I don't want to sneak too many other dead photographers into this meditation on Jacobson, one cannot really think of photographers drawn to Mexico without noting Edward Weston (1886-1958) and his visits there in the 1920s, leaving his wife at home with the children, working closely instead with Italian photographer Tina Modotti (1896-1942). Weston is another photographer who received his first camera as a birthday present, but he was just 16 at the time. Weston just popped up in the news because one of his models/lover/wives in his later career, Charis Wilson, just passed away at age 95.

Marcey Jacobson clearly lived a long and rich life. Her 14,000 negatives will hopefully yield more exciting images as the world studies the work that this photographer left behind.