Who Am I?
A few words about me
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Thank you for your interest in my work. I hope you enjoy viewing it as much as I've enjoyed creating it. I’m Gary Hill, a 60-something living in Gwynedd, North Wales. I play no musical instrument, draw like a child and write crap poetry so about 30 years ago I decided that photography would be my best bet for a much needed artistic outlet and bought myself a Praktica SLR and a couple of lenses and taught myself (with the help of a popular weekly photography magazine) to ‘do’ photography. Not too long afterwards I completed a PhD in visual cognition/neuroscience, fostering a greater appreciation of photography as both a science and an artform, though I do try to put more emphasis on feeling rather than technique. I offer no artist statement as such. I'm not exploring relationships between urban synaesthesia and mythopoetical reality within the realms of neodeconstructionism and subtextual desituationism. I simply come across those scenes and subjects around me that inspire me in some way, press the shutter and post process according to my mood at the time. Call it a 'Zen experience' if you like. I don't. The British documentary photographer Bert Hardy recognised the approach long before I ever picked up a camera: "Everywhere I look, and most of the time I look, I see photographs." As did the American photographer Lee Friedlander: "You don’t have to go looking for pictures......You go out and the pictures are staring at you." Something the Kurdish street photographer Saman Ali agrees with when he describes his work as: ".......discovering the unordinary within the ordinary." Unfortunately, I tend to see unordinary things worthy of a photograph more often when I’m without a camera than I’m with a camera (I don't count phones). I'm probably happiest when I'm in a place I've never been before with an empty memory card and full battery, and a camera bag full of lenses that mysteriously gets heavier with each passing year. Although my work remains eclectic, over the years I've found myself gravitating toward a few central themes, primarily street/candid photography, in particular images concentrating on individuals in uncluttered backgrounds, as well as conceptual images containing a lot of dark negative space. And more and more and more monochrome images. I also regularly volunteer as a clothing and other products photographer for the online store run by the charity Oxfam. Over time I've amassed thousands of 'keepers' and it's always difficult to decide which images to include in a website portfolio. In particular I've come to realise that those images I consider to be my best work aren't necessarily the same images that others consider to be my best. So, many of the images presented here were actually chosen by others. I was once told that my images "tell tales." Because I share my name with a professional wedding photographer in England, as well as a well known American video artist, I've been using 'telltaleimages' as a moniker for my photographic work since 2008. By the way, I don't do any of the standard social media. It wasn't me that wrote that. And I don't write in the third person either. That's even more pretentious. Copyright This is a sister site to my writing oriented site irefuteitthus.com |
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