Strangely Familiar

By Wiley Wood

In talking about his photographs, Jim Jasper mentions the importance of learning a place, becoming part of it. His images—of rocks by the water’s edge, of barns, beaver ponds, white church fronts—are unmistakably local. The camera stares hard at familiar subjects and records a moment of recognition, as though wielded by a space traveler newly landed on a planet that might possibly be his own.

Jasper has had a house in the Grantville section of Norfolk since the early 2000’s. He first came here in 1982 as an art major in college to spend the weeks from Memorial Day to the Fourth of July at the Yale Summer School of Art. “I arrived thinking of myself as a painter or a printmaker,” he remembers, “but I studied with Michaela Murphy, who was the photo teacher then. I learned to print, use a big camera, load sheets of film in the dark, and I fell in love with it. I left thinking of myself as a photographer.”

His professional life took Jasper into communications and design, and in the mid-1990’s he opened a firm in New York City, Jasper Design, specializing in interactive website environments for nonprofits. “It was 10 to 20 people in an office overlooking the Highline,” says Jasper. But in 2012, he changed gears, downsized his business and came to live in Norfolk fulltime. “I thought, I’m moving to the place where I really want to be.”

Jasper shoots in medium format on black-and-white film, which he processes himself. The gelatin silver prints are crisp, detailed, finely nuanced and often span the range from rich blacks to blinding whites. At 11 inches by 14, they are relatively intimate in size. If they’re bigger, says Jasper, they become overly physical, whereas at a smaller scale they can be considered as a series of images, like in books.

Photographer Jim Jasper in his studio in Norfolk with two photos from his current show.

The photos for “Wildwood,” his current show at the Norfolk Library, gain from Jasper’s attention to sequence. A half-submerged rock, rising above the water lilies at pond’s edge, wreathed in laurel leaves, contrasts with a frontal portrait of the blank, white-painted façade of a New England school. An image of trees arching over water, the slender trunks joining their reflections, rhymes with other pictures in which a reflection completes a shape suggestively. A church front gleaming in the moonlight offers an antidote to the stark school façade.

Through their repetition, contrast and visual rhyme, Jasper’s photos point toward a personal mythology being elaborated from elements in the Norfolk environment. “I like to think that you develop a rhythm looking at the sequence,” says Jasper.

“Wildwood” is on view at the Norfolk Library from May 31 to June 24.

Photos by Bruce Frisch.