Bill Jacobson: 1989–1997 gathers photographs made over roughly a decade and was published by Twin Palms Publishers in November 1998. In his own account of the project, Jacobson describes photography as an ongoing meditation around desire, loss, and the role of photography as a vehicle for remembrance. His pictures, he writes, function as metaphors for the way the mind works: simultaneously collecting images while letting others go, fading in the way memories fade, and alluding to the fact that photographs have historically faded as well.

Jacobson has said that while his photography is not specifically about AIDS, it refers to what he learned from being part of a community ravaged by the epidemic, and that losing a steady stream of friends over fourteen years led him to understand the transience of existence. Most photographs, he notes, are meant as documents of moments we wish to hold onto forever; his work suggests that these moments, like life itself, are constantly fading into the past.

The book is a hardcover volume of 112 pages, measuring 10 by 12 inches (approximately 25.4 by 30.48 cm), with 49 tritone plates. Jacobson’s photographs give this period of work a shared physical setting, allowing individual images to be considered alongside the larger project.

Read together, the photographs and Jacobson’s account of the project invite a slow, reflective reading: the blurred, fading images enact the very process of remembrance Jacobson describes, so that turning the pages becomes an exercise in holding on and letting go.