Jacob Luczak

Psychic Readings is pleased to present American photographer Jacob Luczak’s exhibition and book launch, There’s That Fear Again, featuring photographs, drawings and ephemera.

In There’s That Fear Again, Luczak’s (Lu) latest body of work, the images are latent with a mood of paranoia and evasion, marking a time in the artist’s early 20s spent between periods in his hometown of Rome, New York, and frequent retreats away from it, with his dog Poppa. This period involved travel as a routine part of his life, and the photographs, which are intimate and diaristic, are incidental to what was happening around him during the time.

Marking the release of Lu’s first book, Psychic Readings* presents an exhibition of material related to the book, in which Lu has collected prints expanded from within its pages, physical ephemera taken from his personal archive—some of which appears in the book—as well as a collection of drawings relating to this time period.

Because the photographs of the places far from home are mixed up with those of the buildings, sights, and people that were familiar to the photographer for his whole young life, the exact locations of any of them are rendered arbitrary. Lu notes that this is meant to imbue a sense of geographic universality to the body of work as a whole: rather than seeing these images as some kind of travel survey, a venturing outward, we can understand them as diaristic, the result of a more simple process of recording what was visible and significant to a young person during a time of change and upheaval into adulthood. Significantly, only one town within the collection of places is explicitly named. They’re a document of what was proximate and significant to a young man, whether around the people closest to him, or amongst new acquaintances, and in this way, they’re intimate.

These photos do not aspire to document an American pastoral, indicate the wildness, starkness, or vastness of this country, not even image an Americana of any kind; instead, Lu gives us a purely personal folklore, replete with memories, histories, and legends from his own life and past.

The book came about, Lu reminds us, as a result of the prompting of close friends, many of whom had been around him at the times documented within it. There’s a palpable sense of unease across the pages of There’s That Fear Again, discomfort in settling into one place, that is matched by the narrative of perennial coming-and-going from home that plays out throughout the years we witness. At this time, Lu found himself in circumstances that often rendered him paranoid and ill at ease in his hometown, an experience fairly common to those in their early twenties, and perhaps this is part of what spurred him to keep capturing these photos during that time.

The formal play that bears out in the spreads of There’s That Fear Again is partly a result of that perspective of intermittent self-alienation. In this vulnerable time of growth, encountering new people and developing new aspirations, Lu’s vision of his surroundings seems to have become displaced from his own life experience up to that point. Things encountered on lonely side streets, in the front yards of houses, on the bench of a local park, take on new meaning as visual symbols within a personal mythology. Dogs, dilapidated houses, weathered hand painted signage. Many of the spreads within play on pairings, sometimes of rhyming shapes and colors, sometimes making comical opposites or pairs, and other times suggesting grim irony between doubles. These pairings, and the meaning they make, were of course discovered after the fact, in resurfacing the photo archive. This evidence of the way Lu was seeing and recording during this time, unknowingly developing an allegorical language of his own experience from day to day.

—Bergen Hedrickson

Jacob Luczak (b. 1996, Rome, NY) is an American photographer based in New York City. He works primarily in photography and drawing of varying size from intimate snapshots to large-scale, immersive scenes. This is his first solo show with the gallery