In my PHCO class, we are required to give a presentation on a photographer in a few weeks. Out of a long list of allowed artists, I ended up choosing David Hilliard, and quickly fell in love with his work.

David Hilliard, Perennial. 2006.

 

He received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1992, where he actually began as a film student. Of his time in film school, he says in an interview for Slate, “My films were very static. I realized my favorite parts were the most mundane, when I would linger on an object, because I liked to stare at something rather than move through it. It was politely suggested that I was in the wrong department.”

Though he went on to study photography, rather than film, his works are often referred to as cinematic. In an article for A&U, he cites three influences: television, theater, and movies by directors such as Hitchcock and the Coen brothers. “Photography has a ‘magic’ related to but unique from that of cinema and stage,” he explains to The Harvard Crimson.

David Hilliard, Hope. 2008.

 

Hilliard uses large-format, 4×5 film cameras in creating his work. Though at first glance it may look as if he physically cuts his negatives to create his panoramic photographs, that’s not at all what’s going on. Each piece is actually made up of two or more separate photographs of the same scene, taken moments apart. This allows him to play with elements such as perspective, time, and subject matter. “When I was in college I made a triptych of my parents, the three of us having dinner together,” he says to Slate. “But my parents had been divorced for years and they would never be in the same room. … And in the end it was a truth, in that I wish it could’ve been that way, but it wasn’t.”

Jake Naughton writes for The New York Times‘ photography blog Lens, “Mr. Hilliard’s tableaux use the mechanics of his view camera to shift time, focus and viewing planes into sometimes jarring, yet strangely gratifying, combinations. ‘Depending on what the psychological moment is or how I feel about something, I want a lot of shifting,’ [Hilliard says]. ‘Boom, in your face. Boom, suddenly I’m back.'”

David Hilliard, Lather. 2010.

 

There are many recurring themes obvious in Hilliard’s work: aging, intimacy, family, adolescence, masculinity. However, what was most interesting to me is how I could tell almost immediately that Hilliard was not straight. This was confirmed by several articles about him, including the one in The Crimson, in which he said “it isn’t important that my work always be about that, but it is important that the audience knows that these images were made by the lenses of a gay man.”

David Hilliard, Game of Go. 2002.

 

What I did not realize outright was how influential the AIDS epidemic was on his work, about which the article in A&U goes into detail:

 

David Hilliard, Afterglow. 2014.

“I came of age pretty much smack dab in the epicenter of some of the darkest years of the AIDS epidemic,” he said in the interview. “I lost many friends to the virus, and I often think it’s a miracle I’m here today. The early 1980s are so polarized in my mind: the joy of freeing myself from an oppressive town, a cruel, homophobic step-father, and troubling societal expectations I didn’t fit into. Also, the sheer exhilaration of discovering my own queer identity and the often uncontrollable joy of sex with another man. All this empowering and wonderfully formative stuff colliding head-on with the AIDS epidemic and an often narrow-minded world. It was bad, and I know for a fact it had a profound impact on shaping my identity.”

 

David Hilliard, Never the Last Endeavor, detail. 1999.

He continued: “I consider myself a strong, openly gay man. I pride myself in making work about it. I’m also a teacher of photography, and am proud to tell my LGBT students to do the same, if that’s what they want to explore in their own work. Anyway, for all my personal empowerment, my identity in some ways is shaky, its foundation dug, poured, and set in the sad and uncertain, sandy soil of AIDS. It’s a kind of fear that will never go away. I wonder if young people today fully understand the feeling of holding someone in the fit of passion on the brink of orgasmic pleasure and at the same time wondering, fearing, what lies pumping beneath the skin that you’re holding. A person’s mind undergoes some intense compartmentalizing in those moments.” …

Moreover, Hilliard maintains the disease is always with him, stating in the interview: “AIDS is in my work, my life, my history.”

 

 

David Hilliard, Daybooks. 2009.

David Hilliard, Into Another Skin. 2012.

David Hilliard, Susie Floating. 2003.

David Hilliard, Lucky Coin. 1995.