Capturing the Central Valley on Film

The road to Kam Jacoby’s current retrospective has taken him through advanced degrees in printmaking, graphic design, and an MFA in photography. He thinks about photographs a lot and works hard at the image making process. He uses a variety of cameras, both film and digital, and prints, mounts, or mats, most of the images himself.

Along the way, he worked as a photo lab tech, taught art at a local high school, and photography at several colleges, including Allan Hancock in Santa Maria. “Teaching has provided me … a degree of freedom to pursue whatever [photographic] ideas capture my attention,” he says.

One of those ideas is a selection of 12 prints, titled “Central Valley,” which he started in 2023. His plan was for a solo trip though 30 of the Valley’s small and big towns, using Route 99 as a starting point. “Just me and the camera. I didn’t really know what I was going to shoot,” he said.

He worked on the project for more than a year. It soon revealed itself as a number of high-definition frontal portraits of one- and two-story abandoned commercial buildings, each softened by their own faded pastel shades of pink, violet, yellow, and blue. So forgotten are these buildings that even graffiti artists have passed them by. Amazingly, the photographs all appear to have been taken on the same day, about the same time, with the same shadows, blue sky, and white clouds. 

“There aren’t a lot of people in my photographs, but they’re all about people,” said Jacoby. The Central Valley buildings had Jacoby asking himself what their history was, what kind of businesses had occupied the spaces, and what happened to those who owned them, “… all the iterations of their life cycle.” He found them oddly beautiful. 

One of the most haunting series is from Jacoby’s 2009 book Layers: Composite Photographs from the Lompoc Valley, each print a historic black and white scene of the past blended with a modern version in color.

At the center of a 1910 view of a modest, one-story Victorian home is a young, smiling woman dressed in the style of the day. Lucy Bendasher stands in front of her mother’s house, outside a low picket gate somewhere at the western edge of Lompoc. Subtle hues of the now abandoned and deteriorating house bleed in and out. 

Bendasher’s right hand holds her broad hat firmly on top of her head as she leans into a cold wind. The rest of the panorama is Jacoby’s world set in flat agricultural fields that expand in endless directions. An empty road to the left disappears into the distant horizon, the only companions a few PG&E power poles and wind damaged cypress trees, all under a cloudless and bright cobalt sky. 

“I try to imagine the original scene: what the weather was like, what sounds were in the air, what people were thinking and feeling,” writes Jacoby. He compares the historical photographs to sound, a “… possibility of being able to listen to the history of a place etched in the walls,” a perspective that “has resonated in my work and the way I think about photographs.” 

The undercurrents in the retrospective are simple observations of ordinary places, people, and things that we normally pass over in our daily lives. “Things that don’t jump out but are worthy of our attention,” Jacoby says. 

An example of that is the Lompoc Journal series taken on the city’s streets and alleyways. Jacoby describes the “imagery and emotion [that] are more reflective of my own feelings and my experiences growing up in Lompoc.” These are subjects he muses “are not traditionally beautiful pictures but give a specific sense of place” and “my experience of the city, not a Chamber of Commerce version.”

So Far: Selected Works by Kam Jacoby is on view at Elverhøj Museum of History and Art, 1624 Elverhoy Way, Solvang, through January 11, 2026. elverhoj.org