Bright white, out-of-focus, and barely visible, Bill
Jacobson’s Interim Portraits appear like captured memories. The portraits’
details are difficult to discern, but each possesses an individuality—a
particular tilt of the head, a certain style of haircut, posture, and facial structure—the
type of idiosyncratic element that remains vivid in the mind and piercing in
the soul, even when a precise mental picture has faded. Consciously intended as
a response to the loss of friends to AIDS, these pictures have a subtle
homoeroticism that—like the disease—mixes sex and death, desire and loss, the
individual and everyman.