Return to the Scene of the Crime

For his classic "Tom, Tom the Piper's Son" (1969), Jacobs used an early film—preserved in the Library of Congress as a fragile paper print—as the starting point for his analytical re-photography. The source material was Billy Bitzer’s 1905 film of the same name, which brought an English nursery rhyme to life within a setting inspired by William Hogarth’s etching "Southwark Fair". Jacobs restructured the depiction of the story—about a boy stealing a pig in a marketplace—by examining details and detaching the film grain from the original material. Decades later, inspired by the telecine transfer process for a VHS release, he subjected the same material—this time working from a pristine 35mm print—to a renewed deconstruction, employing digital technology with radical ingenuity and infectious wit.