The World Is My Studio: David Hilliard's Technicolor Tableaux

David Hilliard: Photographs of Endurance is on display at the Bernard Toale Gallery through Feb. 26. The gallery is at 450 Harrison Ave. and the easiest way to get there is to take the Red Line to Broadway, cross the bridge in front of you when you leave the station, and then take a left onto Harrison. It's open Tue. through Sat., 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Photography, to me, is an art of the moment. Taking a picture of someone is a way to catch a grain of truth, to suddenly stop and examine a scene more closely. The photographer catches the world by surprise, and we get to observe a stranger's life from his invisible outsider's perspective. Constructed photos work when they recreate that glimpse for the viewer.

Yet after seeing David Hilliard's work, I've begun to change my mind. His photos are not stolen moments or peeks into busy lives. Instead, they create a relationship between the subject and the viewer. Rather than passively revealing a person's truth, Hilliard and his subject are actively telling the viewer something.

The Bernard Toale Gallery is tucked away with several other galleries in a brick building in the South End. Inside, a small, oddly shaped room is painted entirely in white, including the floors. A dog ambles into the room as I walk in, almost as white as the walls themselves. Everything seems slightly surreal.

The gallery suits the art well, for the pictures as well are surreal. They are large and richly colored, bigger and brighter than life. Most are made of several separate prints, taken and hung so that they create one image. Each seems to hover somewhere in between dream and reality, presenting a scene that makes the viewer wonder whether such a scene could occur, or whether the images are just the artist's fantasy.

The work began when Hilliard read The Endurance by Caroline Alexander. This history book tells the story of the failure of an Antarctic expedition, and how the crew managed the amazing feat of survival. The title of each photo is a line from a journal of one of the survivors: "All the Day Dreams Must Go" and "What the Ice gets, the Ice keeps."

None of the subjects of the photos are so blatantly heroic as the survivors in Antarctica. Instead, we see a woman in a flowered dress, looking off into the distance. An elderly woman builds a house of cards. A man wearing only briefs stands proudly straight in the middle of a snowy forest. A drag queen picks fake fruit off strings in lush greenery. A naked man walks away from an Edenic highway rest stop.

Days after seeing the exhibit, these people in his pictures float unbidden to the surface of my mind. Hilliard has carefully created the situations in the photo, down to the pictures on the front of the cards and the empty water bottle lying in the grass. Every detail is put there to tell the story of the subject, but the final story is left to the viewer. He must interpret these details. Perhaps it is because Hilliard only works with people he knows very well, or perhaps it is because everything is so carefully staged, or maybe it is because of the unrealistic and slightly fantastic scenes, or maybe the unresolved nature of the pictures. Yet whatever the reason, the viewer leaves Hilliard's work not only feeling like he knows something about the subjects of the photos, but also feeling like those subjects wanted him to know.