After thinking about it I decided to run ldd against the qjpeg plugin to see what it depended on in the hope that an obvious library would be there. There was an obvious library that it needed which was libjpeg.nn.so in /usr/lib. (Note: ldd complains about static libs so I ran it against the dynamic version of qjpeg.) I checked in /usr/lib and there was also a .a version. After adding the appropriate -L and -l flags to the static portion of LFLAGS in the makefile it linked w/o errors and the statically linked program display the image!

Thanks again for your help!!!