page_title: John P. Jacob
section_title: Eastern Europe & USSR
hierarchical_section_title: John P. Jacob / Eastern Europe & USSR
caption_attribution_description: Catalog of "Out of Eastern Europe: Private Photography" at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT, 1986.
context_page_description: John P. Jacob is an American writer and curator. He grew up in Italy and Venezuela, graduated from the Collegiate School in New York City, and studied at the University of Chicago before earning a BA in Human Ecology from the College of the Atlantic and an MA in Art History from Indiana University.
context_section_description: Since the mid-1980s, Jacob has worked with artists in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, guest-curating exhibitions for institutions in the United States and Europe, including the Liget Gallery, Budapest, Hungary, the List Visual Arts Center at MIT, the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, and the Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg, Halle (Saale), Germany. From 1986–89, he was supported by grants from the Soros Foundations, Hungary and USSR. Émigré writer Jerzy Kosinski contributed an introductory statement to the exhibition Out of Eastern Europe: Private Photography (1987), describing the work presented as “the penultimate art of spiritual confrontation.” In a review for the New York Times, photography critic Andy Grundberg observed its relatedness to “Conceptual, Fluxus, Earth, Performance and Correspondence art forms,” making it different more in circumstance than in kind from Western art. Jacob's exhibition The Missing Picture: Alternative Contemporary Photography in the Soviet Union (1990) was the first one-person exhibition of Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov in the US, accompanied by a parallel exhibition of works by four young Soviet photographers inspired by him. 
  Recollecting a Culture: Photography and the Evolution of a Socialist Aesthetic in East Germany (1999), commemorating the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, presented the archive of the FotoKino Verlag, publisher of the GDR's professional photography periodical, Fotografie. With works dating from 1929–89, photography critic Vicki Goldberg observed of the exhibition that "In the socialist paradise that failed, art was supposed to join the battle to create a new classless utopia on its unstable antecedent, capitalism. Mr. Jacob has done a real service by reprinting some articles from Fotografie that give an idea of what was required of photographers." The American photographer and theorist Diane Neumaier, in her history of Soviet non-conformist photography, credited Jacob's work as foundational to that of later historians such as herself. His essay "After Roskolnikov: Russian Photography Today," edited by Neumaier for the College Art Association's Art Journal, critically examined the impact of Western attention, including his own, on the art of post-Perestroika Russia.
caption: Out of Eastern Europe: Private Photography, 1986.
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