BILL MARTIN - Mendocino Art Center

Jeff Hillier’s
Eloquent Eye
“All art is but a picture of certain basic relationships; an equivalent of the artist’s most
profound experience of life.”
– Alfred Stieglitz
by Michael Potts
The Serene Girl Is Pretty, Waiting For Me At The Corner
Point Arena photographer Jeffery Hillier shoots
what puzzles him. Meaning may come later, and
when it does, it is tempered by a lifetime of invention
and unexpected perspective.
Jeff was born and raised on Chicago’s south side
by a family that was always filming everything (at the
end of an era characterized by pushcarts and neighborhoods).
He doesn’t recall exactly when he started
taking pictures. He remembers getting serious about
photography during his senior year in high school,
when he bought a Brownie box camera and turned in
his film at the corner
drugstore for developing.
Jeff recalls, “I
never doubted I was
an artist, but I never
got any encouragement
from my family.
Being an artist
isn’t a job, you
know.”
Vietnam scooped
Jeff off the loading
docks of his father’s
trucking firm, but
he is uncharacteristically
reticent about
his years as a medical
corpsman with the Marines. Despite the stress of
long range patrols through the DMZ, he remembers
having his camera with him all the time. Honorably
discharged in 1970, he brought his skills to the
Chicago chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the
War, coordinating its actions while taking pictures for
its magazine Winter Soldier.
Inventing his own version of Dorothea Lange’s style
of photojournalism, Jeff did not make the theoretical
connections between his work and that of photographic
greats until he started studying photography
in college on the GI bill. He pounced on an opportunity
to pursue his studies at the San Francisco Art
Institute, where he
got to work and
study with several of
those greats, including
Ansel Adams,
Edward Weston,
and Imogene
Cunningham.
Like so many
who came of age
during the 1960s, Jeff
rattled around for
awhile, Manchester
to Chicago to
Santa Cruz, opening
galleries wherever
he went, but
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