“People are interested in who he was, what was he like: damned if I know, really. But all the information that’s really important is in the music.”
— Chuck Isreals in an interview about jazz pianist Bill Evans
Having been an art museum curator, a graphic designer and an artist has been an advantage in producing a body of photographic work. For the last several years I have been able to concentrate solely on this exploration. As yet, not many have seen this work, and this site gives me a chance to share it.
All of the work is objective and quite formal, dealing with layered spaces and shapes, rich tonality, extreme detail and precise framing. This work is ink on paper, so I relate to the images as drawings, both technically and conceptually. I see and intend elements in these images to be gestural, physically, as if I made every stroke or textural passage by hand on a sheet of paper.
Always it is just me, alone, in a space. I am not photographing people, I am the people in the photograph. The images are objective, yes, but they go beyond empty testimony. I do things with my tools that make them more real, more like how I feel and see, and that draw you in more. These images reward those with longer attention spans.
When you stand behind the camera/machine, you are not a machine. You can never be that impersonal. You have an identity. Sometimes you have to overcome a reluctance to externalize that identity. Is the camera really an unblinking eye?
Bruce Hiles lives and works in Madison, Alabama.