Thank you for your interest in my work. I hope you enjoy viewing it as much as I've enjoyed creating it. I've always found it a daunting task to produce any kind of artist statement, partly because my output is eclectic, but also because writing about yourself in the third person has always struck me as more than a tad pretentious. Here's a few words of introduction anyway.

I’m Gary Hill, retired and living in Gwynedd, North Wales, and previously in Adelaide, South Australia. I play no musical instrument, I draw like a child and I write crap poetry. So, thirty or more years ago I decided that photography might be my best bet for a much needed artistic outlet. I bought myself a budget SLR and a couple of lenses and taught myself, with the help of a popular weekly photography magazine, to ‘do’ photography. Soon afterward I gained a PhD in visual cognition/neuroscience, further fostering an appreciation of photography as both art and science. I value both domains.

Initially, my approach could be described as promiscuous. I simply encountered scenes and subjects that immediately inspired me in some way and, without trying to think too much about it, pressed the shutter. Over the years I've become more focused and find myself gravitating toward a few central themes. Firstly, street/candid photography, involving images concentrating on ordinary individuals in uncluttered backgrounds. My guiding principle here is probably a learned appreciation of the often blurred distinction between the 'ordinary' and the 'extraordinary'. Specifically, an awareness that a scene considered extraordinary by a photographer is often viewed as everyday ordinary in another culture and conversely, what the same photographer might consider to be mundane in their own culture can sometimes be regarded as extraordinary by those from other cultures. Secondly, I experiment with conceptual images containing a lot of dark negative space containing either Christian iconography or subtly, sometimes not so subtly, expressive faces, usually sourced from children's toys. I instinctively discern both these subjects to possess a disturbing and macabre undercurrent. Third, as time goes on I'm creating more and more and more monochrome images.

Why telltaleimages? Well, I share my name with a famous American video artist, a well-established British portrait/wedding photographer and an Australian landscape photographer. Someone once told me my images "tell tales", which pleased me and, to my surprise, that website name happened to be available. I've been fortunate to have my images included in group exhibitions in several European cities and I do use my own name for gallery exhibitions and magazine publication. I also use my own name when I volunteer as a product photographer for the charity Oxfam's online store.

If you wish to use my images for your own purposes please feel free to get in touch, especially if you're a non-profit charitable organisation.

I can be contacted at gary (at) telltaleimages (dot) com 

This is a sister site to my more writing-oriented site irefuteitthus.com