For Jack Bool, the beauty of analogue photography is in the unknowing

Jack Bool’s practice blends art photography with fashion, and these different ways of working inform each other. “I use art pictures in an editorial context”, the artist explains, “contextualising images to contradict their initial function intrigues me”. His images juxtapose beguiling still lifes, landscapes, high gloss fashion images and iPhone shots, to create smooth and cohesive series.

For Jack, “photography is an excuse to indulge in [his] curiosities”; he is interested in capturing the everyday — to turn those moments of apparent nothingness into something. His images are set in familiar backgrounds. “I like to draw from experience”, the artist explains, “places of suburban reprieve, little pockets of sticks and brush behind the whitewash of tract home sprawl”. He turns ordinary spaces into the extraordinary, focusing on places that “function as potential points of escapism,” and stylistically paralleling the colours of the clothes with points in the landscape.

Jack does not take his camera with him, but focuses on the “fleeting moments throughout the day”, allowing the “ideas to sit” in his mind “and take on a new life”. “If, after a time, I am still moved to make the picture, I will return with a camera”, the artist explains; “the camera is used to solidify an idea”. Jack’s photographs come at the subject from abstract angles, similar to the Ukiyo-e, they show a unique approach to perspective. “I am interested in the slippage of the picture plane”, Jack tells us, our questioning the validity of the image in “the moment when the eye cannot immediately resolve the composition because of formal anomalies”.

Jack Bool works with analogue and utilises soft natural light. “For me making pictures is not a rehearsal of technical problem solving”, he tells It’s Nice That, “there has to be room for error. If I knew what the picture was going to look like already, I’d find something else to do”. For Jack, his photographs are about those moments of surprise when the light falls on plastic in an ethereal manner, or perfectly reflects against the water — the beauty of film photography is in the “unknowing”.