This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter focused on the late blooming queer experience, the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.
The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about libraries. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth!
I found the photobook on a shelf on a back wall of the county library just a few blocks from my apartment.
I was not deliberately looking for it; I was more browsing all the photobooks and related materials they had. I was trying to imagine myself as some budding photographic master only temporarily sidelined as a reporter for a small daily newspaper and wanted inspiration. I had only acquired my first decent digital camera the prior winter.
Photobooks are often of unusual sizes and formats and this one was no different. Its incredible width sent its spine jutting off the shelf and into the aisle so it stood out dramatically. So I pulled it down and began to flip through its pages. I could tell from just a quick flip through that I needed this book. I immediately headed to the checkout counter and headed home with it.
I had never heard of David Hilliard. Knew nothing of his work. And given the location of this county library—isolated on the east side of a Pacific Northwest mountain range and in a community not known for its embrace of anything not cisheteronormative—I never expected to find something I would eventually perceive as so quietly and beautifully subversive and affirming and revealing.
Hilliard’s photographs are often panoramic, stitched together in a series of two or more standalone images. Per his website:
For me, the construction of panoramic photographs, comprised of various single images, acts as a visual language. Focal planes shift, panel by panel. This sequencing of photographs and shifting of focal planes allows me the luxury of guiding the viewer across the photograph, directing their eye; an effect which could not be achieved through a single image.
This photobook, Photographs, was Hilliard’s first monograph. It collected work covering several years and not necessarily aligned geographically, thematically or narratively. And yet, each image left me mesmerized. I was hooked by the composition, the texture, the depth, the emotions that seeped from them.
And I was drawn to the men.
Latent homoeroticism saturates many of the photos depicting young men. Some are more subtle or seemingly everyday in nature, from one showing a young man looking back over his shoulder furtively at another as they stand in an infestation of kudzu to “The Classic,” a tightly framed image of a man doing a cliche bodybuilder pose in a locker room. Then there are the obviously queer photos; “The Spoils,” which has a fit model nude from the waist down mending a jock strap by candlelight to the two gay lovers depicted in “The Kiss.”
Hilliard is gay, as he relates to Vince Aletti, a critic who has worked at Rolling Stone and Village Voice, in an interview at the back of the book. It’s something he said he knew about himself since he was a young kid.
…But for some reason, I love men. I love them not just in a sexual way, but men fascinate me.
And Hilliard uses photography to examine his life—his childhood, his relationship with his father, and so on. He details this in conversation with Aletti about two other photos, “The Swimmers” and “Shirts vs. Skins.”
It’s my experience. But I guess this comes close to, and I never thought about this, the time when I realized I had sexual feelings for my friends. I mean, when I was a little boy having feelings for other boys. So it’s that. Maybe this kid [in “Swimmers”] is with the other kids, maybe he’s not. He’s looking down. He’s just not in the moment. He’s not able to be with those boys, for whatever reason. Either they’ve pushed him away or he can’t connect. And I may be watching him. On one hand, it’s me as a parent, wanting to help him, but it’s also that he becomes a stand in for me when I was that age and trying to fit in, but just not quite making it. That’s always the story of my life. Even now, as a grown man, functioning in society, I still don’t feel like I’m ever in a moment. I always feel like I’m a spectator.
I pored over the book for the two weeks I had it checked out. At the time I wondered what held me more—the breathtaking approach to the work itself or the feelings the subjects of the photos gave me. And Hilliard’s interview responses only further reached into me and connected into all those nooks and crannies of my soul that I had worked all my life to hide or reject.
Now, I was nowhere close to being able to accept my queerness at this time—I was still in the midst of my self-imposed guilt and self-hatred reinforced by my conversion to Catholicism while in college. And I was pretty fresh out of those post-secondary years, living far from anyone I knew, and in a community that clung to a white supremacist, patriarchal and puritanical ethos out of stubbornness and desperation.
But to see my own experiences, my own feeling of disconnection, reflected in images and how they also related to another man’s similar experiences was powerful. This photobook, which I had randomly found while browsing a relatively non-descript county library in the rural Pacific Northwest, had given me a glimpse of how not alone I was.
You can learn more about David Hilliard, including his current and upcoming shows and publications here: http://www.davidhilliard.com/
And in case you missed it…
of graciously let me ramble about myself and what it’s like being a late blooming bi/queer in a mixed orientation marriage. I also share my favorite movie of all time.Want to see more posts from this Seed Pod or join in on the fun? Head over to our thread to learn more!
Ty, this is such a wonderful recounting of your experience with a great book! Libraries are an amazing place to find ourselves.
Thank you for this powerful essay, Ty, and for introducing me to a wonderful new photographer.