Photographer Inspired by Mexico

Marcey Jacobson in 2006.






August 11, 2009
, a Photographer Inspired by Mexico, Dies at 97
By Bruce Weber (NY Times)

Marcey Jacobson, a self-taught photographer from New York City who spent decades in the southern Mexican highlands documenting the lives of the indigenous Indian peoples, died on July 26 in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, in the state of Chiapas. She was 97.

The cause was heart failure, said a friend, Janet Schwartz.

Ms. Jacobson was eking out a living in New York City doing mechanical drafting when she first visited San Cristóbal in 1956, intending only a short stay. Instead she found a place she called “the solution to everything,” and, with her companion, Janet Marren, a painter, settled there for the rest of her life.

Chiapas is one of the Mexican states I have not visited, and wish to visit.

She took up photography with a borrowed Rolleiflex camera. Patiently exploring the colorful city, the central marketplace for the Mayan-speaking Indian villages of the region, she won the trust of the often camera-shy locals and taught herself the craft of making black-and-white pictures from what she saw in its cobblestone streets and muddy byways, in its dramatic landscapes and weather events, and perhaps most of all, in the faces of the inhabitants. Her portraits were haunting.

“She had to read how-to-do books on developing and ask Americans to bring paper and chemicals when they came this way to visit,” Ms. Schwartz wrote in an e-mail message on Wednesday.

The results, about 14,000 negatives produced mostly from the 1960s to the 1980s, describe the local daily life, its mercantile, religious and familial rites, in sensitive detail. They are destined for the Na Bolom Museum in San Cristóbal, Ms. Schwartz said.

Most of Ms. Jacobson’s work preceded the Zapatista revolution of 1994, when San Cristóbal was one of the cities briefly seized by leftist forces demanding better treatment for Mexico’s indigenous people. But what the photos frequently reveal are the tensions inherent in an ingrained caste system and the changes in a city and a society undergoing modernization.

In 2001, when she was 90, her work was at last widely recognized; 75 of her photos were collected in a book, “The Burden of Time”/“El Cargo del Tiempo,” printed in a bilingual edition by Stanford University Press.

Marcella Jacobson was born in the Bronx on Sept. 27, 1911. She was by temperament a bohemian, and by political leaning a socialist. She traveled frequently, first visiting Mexico in 1941. In New York working for political causes, she found herself particularly moved by the plight of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, protesting on their behalf outside the White House and visiting the funeral home after their execution. Ms. Schwartz said her friend’s willing escape to Chiapas was no doubt affected by the pressures she felt, as a lesbian and a Communist sympathizer, during the McCarthy era in the United States.

No doubt. A communist lesbian in 1952? What a target she would have made for a zealot.

Ms. Jacobson leaves no immediate survivors. Her partner, Ms. Marren, died in 1998.

“I love being locked up all alone in a darkroom, where nobody can get at me,” Ms. Jacobson said in a 1990 interview published in 2006 in Bridges, a Jewish feminist journal. “You take a negative, you put it in the enlarger, you expose a piece of lined paper, you put it in the developer. It’s absolutely blank. But then it develops, and you watch it, the image floats up to you. And then — you re-experience what you experienced when you took the photograph.”