John Hilliard

John Hilliard (born 1945) is an English conceptual artist. Hilliard's ongoing body of work addresses the specificity of photography as a medium: its uncertainty as a representational device and its status within the visual arts, especially in relation to painting, cinema and commercial photography.

Education Born in Lancaster, Hilliard studied at Lancaster College of Art from 1962 to 1964, and then at Saint Martin's School of Art, London, until 1967. He began his interest in photography as an art student in the 1960s, first using the camera simply to capture images of his site-specific art installations. Soon, he recognised there was bias inherent in photography—the camera could not be completely neutral—and he explored the manipulation of the photographic process and its results.

Art In the 1970s, Hilliard examined how changes to the process of black and white photography could affect the outcome. His art showed how the camera's notional objectivity was vulnerable to decisions made by the photographer leading up to the instant of the exposure, as well as subsequent decisions made in the darkroom concerning paper selection and development techniques. Each image was given its own one-word title to indicate a narrative: "Crushed", "Drowned", "Burned", and "Fell". University of Ulster photography professor Terence Wright noted that Cause of Death is a formalist piece in which the process is revealed, and that many of Hilliard's works fall into this classification.

In the 1990s Hilliard's work evolved a stronger chroma, push processing, saturation, and seductive gloss, the subjects arranged to portray a narrative that was perhaps violent or erotic. At the same time, the viewer is prevented from complete comprehension of context by interposed objects obscuring portions of the scene. For instance his work Miss Tracy, 1994 shows what is assumed to be a nude woman face down on a bloody sheet, the center of the image blocked by a large rectangle leaving the peripheral region as the only source of understanding. In the mid-1990s Hilliard further expanded the scale of his photographic works by printing on canvas or vinyl, the size approaching that of a mural. He continued to present the viewer with a disruption of full understanding, a critical comment on the viewing process.

In early 1989, an exhibit of Hilliard's large scale works was featured for one month at Chicago's Renaissance Society museum. The works consisted of large Cibachrome and Scanachrome prints, the latter being saturated colour applied to canvas using dyes.

In 1999, a major retrospective of Hilliard's works was mounted, and shown in three German art galleries.

In 2003, German publisher Verlag das Wunderhorn published a monograph of his works, entitled The Less Said The Better,

Career Hilliard taught for a time at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. Currently, Hilliard lives and works in London.