A New York–based photographer, Bill Jacobson has exhibited selections from his ongoing project “Interim Photographs” for several years, most memorably at the Grey Art Gallery in New York in 1993, when a room full of his ghostly, shadowy portraits stood in sharp contrast to the adjacent retrospective of George Platt Lynes. The work of Platt Lynes stands foursquare in the mainstream of American Formalist art photography, however much it also exceeds and escapes many of the restrictions of the “school” that begins with Alfred Stieglitz, through Albert Weston, to Lee Freidlander, Robert Mapplethorpe,

John-Paul Philippé is an American painter who spent most of the ’80s in London, though he has shown widely in New York since participating in a group show at the Drawing Center in 1992. A natural colorist, Philippé deliberately reduced his color range to grays and biscuits in the early ’90s and began working with a small range of formal elements, which for him condensed childhood memories and his physical and emotional ambivalence about AIDS. These are all “portraits” in a most general sense. Yet by restructuring the basic elements of his paintings to shapes that resemble tears, nails, feet,