BROADCASTS.com

b'My guest is Gideon Jacobs. In 2016 Gideon staged a social media performance piece in which he went on a month long virtual road trip from New York to California. Using other people\\u2019s photographs geotagged to his corresponding itinerary and writing fictitious captions that recounted his days spent on the road, he built an extended narrative capturing an acute feeling of self discovery. Of course none of it really happened. Gideon writes that the work might remind us that we don\\u2019t just go places and photograph what happens, but what happens is a function of what we photograph. Gideon\\u2019s work exists at the intersection of writing, art, and performance, but what connects the disparate parts of his practice is a continual preoccupation with narrative, with the ways it can seduce, inform, and mislead. This has a lot to do with photography, something that\\u2019s always been central to Gideon\\u2019s work. He formerly served as Creative Director of the storied photojournalism agency Magnum Photos, and regularly contributes writing on photography to publications such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, VICE, and Bomb Magazine. His fiction, much like the writing in #INSTAROADTRIP2016 is highly experimental, often manifesting in extremely short works that can be read on a single page or screen. It\\u2019s a way, he says, of pushing back against more established modes of writing and tailoring work for a new kind of consumption. It\\u2019s through thinking about the ways we\\u2019ve built narratives in the past, either through photography or the written word, that Jacobs finds new ways to consider how narrative functions today. Here I am with Gideon Jacobs.\\n\\nYou can see more of Gideon\\u2019s work at http://www.gideon.works/ and you can see my portrait of Gideon at home on Instagram @william.jess.laird @image.culture or at www.williamjesslaird.com/imageculture'