J. Sybylla Smith, In Conversation with Renée Jacobs

Episode #28 Summary:

Polaroids is a celebration of collaboration giving voice to female empowered embodiment of sexuality, desire, sensuality and authentic agency in B & W portraits of female nudes.

Episode Notes 

Renée Jacobs, a photojournalistic turned civil rights lawyer turned erotic documentarian, uses  photography to explore her own sexuality and to listen and give voice to the desire of her co-collaborators. Joyful, intense, alluring and lustful, each image is a story grounded in visualizing felt emotion. Jacobs notes; “ I switched the lens and the lens switched me.”

In this book group, Renée Jacobs discusses, among other things:

  • Standing in your own light

  • Carving a space to listen to co-collaborators

  • Desire needing context

  • Twin motivators of loss and longing

  • Relating to Gordon Parks’ experience of needing Paris

  • Widening technical exposure, experiment

  • The luck to have mad genius friends

  • Inspiration from Japanese bookmaking techniques

  • The rule of 6 twists to pop French bubbly

Referenced in the episode

L'Oeil de Photographie- PARIS

Sinners Exhibit in Paris Video

Photo de Femmes

Cynthia McAdams

Alice Austin House

Smith Colleges - Voice of Feminism Oral History Project 

Body; The Photography Book - Nathalie Herschdorfer 

Fan the Flames ; Queer Positions in Photography at the Ontario Art Museum 

Art & Queer Culture - Catherine Lord & Richard Meyer

Aperture 218 Spring 2015 - Queer 

Joan E Biren - Dyke Show Lesbian Images in Photo 1850 

Published by Galerie VEVAIS

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J. Sybylla Smith, In Conversation with Jocelyn Lee

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J. Sybylla Smith, In Conversation with Mona Kuhn