Hans Hickerson – Transgressions

Guest Review by Bill Edwards •

Hans Hickerson’s Transgressions playfully leads the viewer through a visually engaging journey through timeless images that the artist photographed between 1979 and 1982. The photographs are delicately cut into a merged cacophony of ideas as well as moments in time. These images challenge the viewer with an editor’s touch of applying conflicting and negative space into complementing patterns. The elements removed add to the image supporting the subject in a decisive way. Additionally, this project compiles images that reach beyond candid portrait captures as well as inner city exploration.

Hickerson’s process incorporates multiple images merging in a way that extracts the unnecessary elements while breaking the prescribed rules of what a photograph is supposed to be. The cuts, edits and layering are done with care and playful precision. It is in this process the ordinary transgresses into the extraordinary.

The essence of a silver halide image embedded within a paper medium we take for granted. Cherished and placed often as a sacred memento, the thought of excising the unnecessary and trimming into something more requires care, brevity and the need to toss out the rules. In the ethos of punk rock, Hickerson applies his skill beyond the art of capture, focusing the core of the image while defining the negative space into a space of thoughtful illumination.

With the decisive cut, deconstruction, and reconstruction through multiple processes, Hickerson provides us with multiple views of his work. These alternative views are both insightful as well as satirical. His choice to produce this project provides an authentic moment in time augmented by the artist’s eyes and hands bridging documenting the past with the feel of a traditional silver gelatin sourced imagery. The palette of selections provides a variety of candid portraits while attending to the engaging details of a transitioning urban growth and decay of the early 1980’s.

Most importantly, we are reminded these are pieces of paper. He has achieved this monumental task engaging his viewer with engaging subjective views, deep monochromatic moods rich in textured features as well as highly refined constructed compositions. Lastly, Hickerson provides an homage to his early work in this self-published gem. The reproduced image quality of the print work provides the necessary detail to feel these constructions firsthand. The superb tones and detail will draw one into reviewing this playful collection of images, finding new aspects with each viewing.

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Bill Edwards is a fine-art photographer from Tustin, California.

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Transgressions. Cut-Out Photographs – Hans Hickerson

Photographer: Hans Hickerson (resides in Portland, OR)

Texts: Hans Hickerson; poem by W.H. Auden

Language: English

Hardcover illustrated; 30 monochrome and color photographs, 54 pages, 10 x 8 inches; ISBN 9798987280515

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