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