• My Account
    • View Order
    • Change Password
    • Edit My Address
    • Log Out
  • 0Shopping Cart
Light Work
  • Info
    • Visit / Contact
    • Mission / History
    • Partners & Sponsors
    • Blog
  • Opportunities
    • AIR Program
    • Grants Program
    • Careers
    • Artist Index
  • Exhibitions
  • Urban Video Project
    • UVP Exhibitions
    • UVP Events
    • UVP Commission
    • UVP Community Nights
  • Contact Sheet 
    • Subscribe
    • Back Issues
  • Collection
  • Lab
    • Light Work Lab
    • Membership
    • Do-It-Yourself (DIY)
    • Services
    • Education
    • Reservations
  • Shop
    • Fine Print Program
    • Signed Books
    • Contact Sheet
    • Donate
    • Become a Benefactor
    • Returns & Payment Info
  • Search
  • Menu Menu

Subscription Program

Light Work offers basic subscriptions to Contact Sheet as well as book and print level subscriptions, in which you can select a book or print to receive along with the publication. Please make your selection based on your preferred subscription level. Your subscription directly supports Light Work’s programs, including our residencies, exhibitions, publications, and more. Thank you!

Contact Sheet 174:
Jackie Nickerson

$12

Contact Sheet 174: Jackie Nickerson
Paperback: 48 pages
Publisher: Light Work (December 1, 2013)
ISBN: 935445-86-2

In stock

Categories: Back Issues, Contact Sheet
  • Description

Description

Jackie Nickerson makes photographs that examine people and their relationship to the earth, through the physical and psychological conditions of living and working on the land. With her exhibition Terrain, Nickerson revisits eastern and southern Africa, focusing on how the exertions of labor leave traces on people and the environment.

After fifteen years working in the fashion industry for clients like Interview and Vogue, Nickerson felt unfulfilled and sought something more. In the late ‘90s she took a trip to Zimbabwe with a friend, expecting to be there for just a few weeks. She ended up staying for four years, traveling through other countries of Sub-Saharan Africa in a small flatbed truck. She has since returned many times to continue photographing farm life through her unique lens. Hands and plants, limbs and fabric, bodies and soil, the subjects of Nickerson’s portraits are, in the fullest sense, terrene—of the earth. The workers are obscured by the sheer size and weight of their harvest, emphasized by the large scale of the photographs themselves. Many of her landscapes are photographed through a thin veil of plastic farming material, easily read as a metaphor for our modern separation from the natural world. “I believe that we have an indelible link to the earth but we’ve begun to undervalue it—even forget about it,” says Nickerson. Her contemplative pictures ask us to consider our own relationship to the land, and to the food we consume in our daily lives.

Nickerson reveals by carefully concealing. “The lack of personal identity in the photographs is a deliberate question mark,” she explains. Her portraits are not about individual identity but are an attempt to go beyond the traditional path of concerned documentary photography, revealing her subjects as sculptural, monumental, and empowered. “It is about us in the landscape,” says Nickerson, “how we change the world we inhabit at every moment of our being human and how, for better and for worse, the habitus that we make, in turn, changes who we are.”

This catalog includes and essay by Shane Lavalette.

—

Jackie Nickerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1960. Her work has been exhibited internationally including at the Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; National Portrait Gallery, London; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and the Hereford Museum, Herefordshire, UK. Her work is held in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Vatican Museums, Rome; and the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. She is the recipient of a Culture Ireland award and three Visual Art Bursaries from the Irish Arts Council. Nickerson is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York.

www.jackienickerson.com

Related products

  • Contact Sheet 157:
    Light Work Annual 2010

    $12
  • Contact Sheet 169:
    Shen Wei

    $12
  • Contact Sheet 161:
    Jeffrey Henson Scales

    $25
  • Contact Sheet 102:
    Light Work Annual 1999

    $27

Light Work was founded as an artist-run non-profit organization in 1973.

Our mission is to provide direct support to artists working in photography and related media, through residencies, publications, and a community-access lab facility.

Read more →

Light Work Lab offers members a the highest quality printing and scanning equipment, black-and-white darkroom, a lighting studio, and a lounge and library where artists from all over the world converge.

Become a member today →

Connect with Light Work

Instagram →
Facebook →
Twitter →
Vimeo →
Newsletter →

Copyright ©1973– Light Work — 316 Waverly Avenue Syracuse, NY 13244
  • Mail
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Vimeo
  • Vimeo
  • Rss
James WellingContact Sheet 175:
Aspen Mays
Scroll to top

Let's celebrate! — 50th Anniversary: Selections from the Light Work Collection is on at the Everson Museum of Art through May 14, 2023. Dismiss