Behind the Work: Tuning Form to Frequency
- Jesse Jacques
- May 5
- 5 min read
Image created by me, Jesse Jacques, May 2025
Photographed on Cinestill 800T film on medium format. One expression of a signal tuned through structure, not style.
Hey everyone,
This week, I’m sharing a deeper look at a recent project. It’s part of a series of images built using similar principles, but for now, I’m sharing just this one. Instead of doing a standard breakdown of how it came together, I want to take a higher-level angle and focus on what actually brought this image to life beneath the surface.
It was shot on Cinestill 800T film, on medium format. All the elements were built and assembled with practical materials, physically constructed, not digitally arranged. But more than the materials or tools, what shaped this image was something I was tuning into.
If you’ve followed my work for a while, you know I don’t approach images purely as stories, even when they are narrative. I treat them more like tuning forks. I’m not just trying to make a clean composition. I’m adjusting it until it holds a certain charge. Not just visually, but energetically. You might not be able to name what’s happening, but you’ll feel it when it lands.
Where It Starts
This piece didn’t begin with a concept or a theme. It began with contact, a felt sense of structure that existed before I had words for it. There was already an arrangement taking shape, not in thought, but in the field. My job wasn’t to invent it. It was to tune to it, translate it, and shape it into form.
The concept came later. Once the structure was stabilized, meaning began to surface. But that wasn’t the source. It was the byproduct.
This wasn’t coming from the intellect. It was arriving through perception. Sometimes the full geometry shows up at once. Other times, it comes in stages, like being handed just enough to place the next piece. I’ll sense that a shape belongs, even without knowing why. I’ll keep adjusting spacing until the image stops pushing back. Until something inside settles and I know it holds.
It’s not about balance in a visual sense. It’s energetic.
I’m tuning the image to a signal I’m already in contact with, something moving through me, not from me.
What I’m Tuning To
There are two fields that structure human experience, not as metaphor, but as reality.
The first is personal: your own field. Not just emotion or energy in the casual sense, but the coherent signal that underlies your physical system. None of your thoughts, chemistry, or perception arise in isolation. They follow the frequency your field is broadcasting. That field holds memory, imprint, and pattern, often long before you’re consciously aware of them. When it’s coherent, you have access. When it’s distorted, everything stays out of tune.
The second is the greater field, the source layer. It isn’t personal, and it’s not symbolic. It’s structural. This is the architecture reality rests on. It’s what precedes language, sensation, and time. What underlies rhythm, vibration, geometry, memory, resonance, healing, color, and intelligence itself. You don’t need to believe in it. You’re built from it.
That’s the field life is drawn from, whether you recognize it or not.
You’re not just a body with thoughts. You are a transmission system. Your attention, your nervous system, and your breath don’t just reflect your state. They help tune it. And when your tuning reaches coherence, you don’t just feel better. You begin to access forms and information that were always present, but impossible to stabilize until now.
This isn’t mysticism. It’s mechanical in function, metaphysical in origin. That’s the paradox. And the point.
When I’m working, whether it’s photography, filmmaking, or any other medium, I’m not disappearing into the process. I’m showing up for it completely. I’m not imposing an idea, but I’m not stepping out of the way either. I’m stabilizing my field enough to become a participant in transmission. What moves through me is shaped by who I am, what I’ve lived, and what I’m here to hold.
What This Image Stabilized
I didn’t begin with a message, but something was being communicated.
There was a structure forming before I could name it. I could feel its presence as I worked. It wasn’t loud or symbolic, but it was there, steady, specific, and asking to be held. That’s what guided every choice. Not aesthetics. Not theory. Just the signal itself, something that needed to be stabilized into form.
The triangle wasn’t just a design element. It stabilized will.
The circle held wholeness.
The water interrupted the geometry just enough to shift the balance without collapsing it.
And the colors weren’t chosen for mood or trend. They were frequency-based. Each one carried a tone, a charge, something the field needed to stay intact.
What I was building wasn’t meant to be decoded. It was meant to be received.
Coherently. Quietly. Without distortion.
And when the last adjustment settled, I felt it, not as a moment of satisfaction, but of stillness. Like the structure had stopped moving because it was finally in place. Not just balanced, but active. Broadcasting.
This wasn’t creative play. I work professionally. The image still has to communicate. It has to deliver. But that doesn’t mean separating structure from purpose. It means aligning them so precisely that the transmission holds in any context, visual, emotional, or spatial.
Even when the composition is abstract, the energy isn’t.
It’s doing something. Not just for me, but for the person who sees it. For the room it enters. For the field it touches.
When It Lands
I don’t create these images to decode them. I create them to hold something. Something the field is already saying, and I’m just listening closely enough to shape it.
Sometimes it comes through as vision. Sometimes as pressure. Sometimes as a form that won’t leave me alone until it’s placed just right. I don’t always know what it’s doing while I’m making. But once it lands, I can feel what it’s stabilizing. Not just in the image, but in me.
This isn’t about chasing originality or making something clever.
It’s about coherence.
It’s about restoring signal in a time that distorts nearly everything.
That’s what I’m practicing, through visual work, filmmaking, or anything I build.
Not expressing for the sake of expression. Not designing for attention.
But shaping frequency into form until it holds. Until it speaks.
And when the signal is clear, it doesn’t matter what context it enters, personal, professional, ritual, or artistic.
It delivers.
Even quietly.
Thanks for reading. More soon.
When you're ready to shape the unseen into image, the path opens. Let's begin.
