Jacob Bond Hessler

Camden, Maine-based photographer Jacob Bond Hessler is known for his expansive and meditative images of the natural and built environments. In his latest series, Garden of Shadows, he turns his observant eye to the night landscape. "As of late, darkness is no longer an absence to me—it is a vessel," he says. "In my work, I explore darkness as a living, necessary presence, the fertile ground in which light becomes meaningful. Without shadow, brightness flattens; without loss, renewal is hollow."

Hessler's photographs in Garden of Shadows treat darkness as both aesthetic and psychic space, "a place where pain, grief, and quietude coalesce and give rise to the fragile shoots of hope." Deep tones and obscured forms invite close looking—slivers of light, delicate marks, and illuminated materials break through as gestures of renewal. The physicality of surface—rough, smooth, layered, aglow—recalls the mystery that soil holds and memory, suggesting that what feels barren can also hold seeds. "As the spring comes only after the winter," says Hessler, "the ensuing dawn only appears from the inky night."

Jacob Bond Hessler is a graduate of the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara and pursued his master's degree in graphic design at Parsons, The New School for Design. He worked in New York as a commercial photographer and art director from 2006 to 2011, when he returned to his hometown in midcoast Maine to focus on his fine art photography. In 2017, Hessler released Boundaries, a limited-edition fine-press book of photographs and poetry in collaboration with 2013 presidential inaugural poet Richard Blanco, published by Two Ponds Press. The original photographs and poems from Boundaries have been exhibited at the Coral Gables Museum, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and the Ogunquit Museum of American Art.

Garden of Shadows

May 23 – June 27, 2026

Selected Works

Press Release