Joseph D. Jachna: Surface Contradictions 1958-1971

For Joseph D. Jachna, photography has always been a spiritual practice. His photographs are quiet meditations—offerings from a lifelong naturalist. Jachna considers himself a poet with a camera, creating the visual equivalent of a Haiku. As with Haiku, the highest form of Japanese poetry, his ideas flow with an intensity created by combining a few carefully chosen elements in a spare and elegant framework.

Surface Contradictions is comprised of over sixty previously unknown vintage photographs from the artist’s 1961 thesis project on the subject of water, along with images made several years later in Door County, Wisconsin.  These photographs represent an overarching theme Jachna returned to time and again, all ideas of self - exploration, reflection, and expression.  Incorporating opposing surfaces found in the outdoors – Rough/Smooth; Wet/Dry; Matte/Lustre; Luminous/Dark; Teeming/Empty; Opaque/Transparent – Jachna enhances natural contrasts, and from his simplified compositions, complex revelatory images arise.