Week Six: David Hilliard

Between David Hilliard and Martin Parr, two photographers addressed during my critique in class on Wednesday, I chose to analyze Hilliard’s work more closely. As I view collections from both photographers, I concluded that it is Hilliard’s work that not only applies slightly more the work that I have created and intend to continue to create, over Parr's images, mostly due to the idea of space over content.

Parr’s work features the strong presence of people in their natural environments, dealing with everyday tasks within their career or daily lives. The images show perspective, but do not provide enough clarity or detail in portraying these individuals as the center of the pieces. Not only the people around them consume them, but also by the backdrop that doesn’t aid in providing a context that makes the subject all the more intriguing. I found myself becoming distracted by the other surrounding subjects, including other human presences and cropped sections of background environment.

As I clicked the tab next to Parr’s work, I was immediately consumed by the work of David Hilliard. Before I begin to break down Hilliard’s vast collection of pieces spread out over a numerous number of years, I would like to briefly acknowledge the “artist impact.” This is an idea that I would describe and emphasize as a crucial component to not only the distinguished eye of the viewer, but also the power, skills, talents, and abilities of the said artist, photographer. I believe it is beyond recognizable when a viewer can be so instantly drawn to one artists work over another. I viewed Parr’s work and in comparison to Hilliard’s, I did not feel the same attachment, interest, and over all feeling of beauty that I felt when I made my way through Hilliard’s website. Perhaps this is due to my personal preference, what I prove to be aesthetically pleasing, which can then relate to how to artist presents his or her work, or it can be a clear depiction of a single artistic component of decisions that creates an identifiable barrier between one photographers work next to another’s, especially when they seem to be focusing and representing the same form and shape of ideas.

With that being said, Hilliard’s work, I find to be the most well represented, well rounded, symbolization of the idea that not only I have decided to express as a concentration in my photographic work, but also in his. Expanding my interests in portrait photography, I have decided to concentrate not only on the subject of my photograph, but also the environment that surrounds them and allows the essence of the subject to grow and become well embodied. By not only making the artistic decision to create one image via a break down of separate images, ranging from two to five, Hilliard’s eye allows for him to see the whole in all of its parts. This is an idea that I find incredibly crucial to photography. One can never be sure how a viewer will perceive an interpret the work, they might just chose one singular section and have that be the focus of the work than then the piece in its entirety. With Hilliard’s method he is creating that process already for the viewer.

Many of Hilliard’s pieces, from 1993-2012, contain one singular or a multiple of different human forms, however, with these wide, almost panoramic vantage points, nothing is being over powered, where the focus of the piece would vanish. These images are visually beautiful as a whole, and when I find myself covering up the other section of the piece, I am not discouraged or turned off. It becomes its own piece of art that tells its own story. By slowly revealing the rest of the sections, the viewer has to ability to have their own story unfold. After viewing these astounding pieces, I have been inspired to expand my very close and clear focal point. This was something that I attempted and succeeded in doing within my Asian Market series; however, I have made a more concrete decision on how to expand with the ideas I have been exploring in my latest works. My goal is to keep the human form as the subject, but like Hilliard, I have recognized that the environment can enhance the perception of the individual and create a more diverse image that can evoke a more question filled analysis. By using a wider lenses and expanding my foreground of the human form to the background of the outside world, I can create a more insightful, thoughtful, and extensive image.