6 spring street
new york city 10012
tel: 212.219.0166
info@jenbekman.com

david hilliard

statement

For years I have been actively documenting my life and the lives of those around me, recording events and creating order in a sometimes chaotic world. While the images I make focus on the personal, the familiar and quite simply the ordinary, the work strikes a balance between autobiography and fiction. Within my photographs a physical distance is often manipulated to represent one of emotion. The casual glances people share can take on deeper significance, and what initially appears subjective and intimate is quite often a commentary on the larger contours of life.

For me, the construction of my large color panoramic photographs, comprised of various single images functions as a visual language; focal planes shift, panel by panel, guiding the viewer through each piece. This sequencing of photographs and shifting focus allows me the luxury of leading the eye across the photograph; an effect I could never achieve, in quite the same manner, through a single image.

My work often focuses on my emotional and sexual relationships with men. I do consider my identity as a gay man to be an integral component to my photography. While much of the work is not of an outward sexual nature, I do find that my images take on a deeper significance when the viewer is aware that they have been made through the eyes of a gay man.

In 1999 my work ventured off onto a slight tangent after having read Caroline Alexander’s book “The Endurance” detailing the epic struggle of explorer Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to the Antarctic in 1914-16. For nearly two years, Shackleton and his crew of 27 were lost. Adrift on an ice floe, their ship left crippled and ice-locked, the crew’s prospects appeared hopeless. This book, replete with the crew’s journal entries and a series of breathtaking photographs, left me to ponder my own definiton and experiences (if any) of heroism and our own strengths and weaknesses which are continually tried throughout the course of our lives, however important, quiet, or commonplace. This series of images which I call “Photographs of Endurance” examines my own concepts of human frailty and resilience.

Another series entitled “Making Boys Cry” deals with our constant struggle for control, be it within our personal relationships or our own minds. Presently I’m in the midst of making work entitled “Catch and Release”. This newest series of images scrutinizes a world steeped in testosterone. From boyhood to manhood, the photographs examine nebulous aspects of the masculine environment: A boy wins first place, teenagers stripped of their shirts compete against each other, a man dreams of a world just beyond his reach, while others race toward intoxication. Men win and lose, and in both cases, are left unfulfilled - longing for more. The objects of our sexual desire are often allusive, if not altogether unobtainable. In a world of Catch & Release we often let go of the coveted and search for that which we do not have. Ultimately, in the wake of these experiences, we are left with a vivid memory. These are the images of those memories. Some are mine, others are not, while others may belong to you.