David Hilliard: Between Biography and Fiction

Photographer David Hilliard, who taught a VES photograph class at Harvard this fall, talked about his new work now showing at Bernard Toale.

David Hilliard: For me, it's important that all the people in these photographs I know, they're places I'm familiar with. I think that I do my best work when it's personal, but it's not important for you the viewer to know that. It doesn't need to be my grandmother. But the fact is, you have an elderly woman building a card house, which for me is the ultimate sign of optimism and perseverance, and yet at the same time it represents fragility because there's a gust of the wind and the card house is gone.

The Harvard Crimson: Do you plan the photos beforehand or just go out and say, "I think I'll take a picture of that?"

DH: For me, the world is my studio, I'll go out and some things will just kind of happen, to make a picture. Or sometimes I stage them right from their inception. I have a series of working styles, but I don't adhere to any one fully. But they are completely constructed-even if I happen on a place, I'm still creating a fiction. The work really does exist somewhere between autobiography and fiction. They are places that I know, people that I know. Yet, these aren't moments that are real. This is a friend who's struggling with HIV, but he doesn't go into rest areas like that. They're kind of fantastic in their illustration.

Because they're set up, there's a certain kind of rigidity in the work that I really like, that you see in older portraits from the turn of the century, when cameras were very big and clunky and exposures were very long due to the slow photographic process, and, because of the newness of photography, there was a certain kind of respectful gaze by the sitters. You know, these old photographs and how people regard the camera. There's always that sense in these photographs, maybe for different reasons.

THC: What are you working on now?

DH: I've just started to think about a new series I want to make called "Imminent Danger." The work is initially going to be funny-it's going to stem from these kind of blatant illustrations of accidents around the home. Think about all the things your mother used to tell you never to do. Someone in a bathtub with an electrical appliance nearby, someone on a chair on some books screwing in a lightbulb. So some of them are going to be kind of funny, staged, accidents about to happen. But some of them are going to be more open-ended. Two figures beneath a sheet which, in the context of these other photographs, this beautiful sexual experience is an imminent danger, it's about the transmission of a disease...a little more loaded.