Sigrid Jakob’s work consists of “commissioned” portraits of gay male bears or chubs, which her clients use in online web-based dating service profiles, paired with text panels documenting the artist-sitter correspondence preceding and following the individual shooting sessions. She describes her motivation;
I do this because I find them beautiful, and hope that appreciation and desire show in the pictures. I want to unsettle viewer’s habits of consuming images of the male body, challenging the very restrictive norms that govern how male bodies are shown. My overall goal is to contribute and to expand the ongoing discourse on how men look at men, women look at men and how we look at ourselves. But in the end this project is about the complexity of what happens when one human being looks at another human being.
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Jakob’s art exists in two realms, that of the purely creative and/or conceptual and that of the commercial or service providing, each strengthening the other. Her attention to the broader themes encompassing the work provide each sitter with images that far surpass both commercial portraits or the common self-shot image, while the genuine gratitude of the sitter—displayed in the accompanying text panels—speaks truth to her motivations and illustrates her honest compassion for her “clients.”
