Tom Jacobi, born in 1956 in Bonn (Germany), started photographing when he was fifteen years old. After a short escapade into studying law, he joined the renowned photo agency Sven Simon in 1976, at the age of twenty. His primary focus laid on taking portraits of leading German politicians, Willy Brandt, Ludwig Erhard, Helmut Schmidt, and Helmut Kohl being among them. Archaic and seemingly raw landscapes, rugged cliffs, magic vastness, graphic structures of water, desert, clouds, and ice: For four years former Stern art director Tom Jacobi traveled through seven continents and created a view of the world in its essential materiality with his large-format landscapes. With his trilogy composed out of his series »Grey Matter(s)« (2014–2015), »Into the Light« (2015–2017) and »The Light Within« (2018) Tom Jacobi has created an homage to nature and planet Earth. His style and approach are putting him in the tradition of landscape photography by Ansel Adams or Sebastião Salgado. The trilogy distinguishes itself by being photographed in colour, even though colour is mostly excluded from his work. Jacobi finds countless nuances within the spectra of grey, white and bronze to form an achromatic cosmos, which he describes as the “absence of the juggler colour”.
