Photographer finds truth
revealed through photos
By kathy baratta
Staff Writer
JEFF GRANIT Howell resident Andrei Jackamets is presently showing a collection of his photographs at the New Jersey Museum of Boating, Point Pleasant.
HOWELL — One of the more noticeable qualities about photographer Andrei Jackamets is how well suited he is to his chosen medium. Get him to wax philosophical on the language of photography and the lyrical descriptions of his work are as captivating as his photographs.
Jackamets always loved taking pictures, he said, because he has always associated something pleasurable with photographs.
He said he remembers how his father, a psychiatrist and "cultured traveler," would always bring home pictures of exotic places he had visited. Looking at the pictures was almost as wonderful as being there had been for his father, he said.
Pictures allow him to enter other people’s worlds, said Jackamets, a township resident.
Photographs, he said, are a process of which only a part is mechanical.
"When you look at a photo, you look past what the person was saying," Jackamets said. "Even more so in that it’s truthful."
Jackamets says looking at photographs and what you take from them reveals how you look at life.
The difference between color and black-and-white photography becomes poetry when he explains it.
Having earned a fine arts degree from the Philadelphia University of Fine Arts, Jackamets said he loved studying the theory of color and photography.
"A color photo is like a diary and some people have nothing to write," he said. "A black-and-white photo can be a novel. Looking at it you can project yourself and your own colorful impressions."
Jackamets’ photography is presently on display at the New Jersey Museum of Boating in Point Pleasant. Called "Water: Liquid Landscape," the photographs are a collection of water images he enhanced through double and triple exposures as well as computer-enhanced imagery.
By incorporating these processes of layering and texture, Jackamets adds a new dimension to common water rhythms.
"They’re real, but in a sense, they’re not truthful," he said.
The 24 photographs on display at the museum take the viewer into Jackamets’ world and he gets to share his visual ambition to help others see things differently.
"We can communicate nationally and internationally through a visual medium whether or not we can speak the same language," he said.
As a professional photographer, he has many corporate clients, but Jackamets said he also shoots weddings, bar mitzvahs — "the usual." He is also the house photographer for the Strand Theater in Lakewood.
Having grown up in Lakewood, he said he loved cataloguing the progress of renovating the venerable theater since he became its photographer in 2000.
He also photographs the stars and performances at the theater, overseeing the theater’s public relations photos and Internet Web site.
Jackamets teaches a photography class at Ocean County College, Toms River, so he can cultivate a passion for photography in others.
He said he liked the idea of sharing his work with others through the boating museum because it is an educational venue rather than a fine art venue, and therefore lends itself to discussions of the photos.
His own Internet Web site, www.hardshadow.com features a gallery of his work. His photographs will remain on display at the New Jersey Museum of Boating in Point Pleasant through Sept. 17.