Focusing on John Hilliard’s fascination with the monochrome and visual obstruction, this career-spanning volume draws together the artist’s diverse engagement with photography. Perhaps best known for iconic ‘photo-conceptual’ works produced during the 1970s, this British artist’s work explores the limits of the photographic medium. Using new and pioneering processes, such as overlaying prints and incorporating projector screens, the artist aims to disrupt the viewer’s relationship to the photograph. Hilliard’s focus on the monochrome ‘blanks out’ the picture to undermine the photograph’s usual expectations and draw the viewer’s attention to the context of its creation. Duncan Wooldridge provides a survey on Hilliard’s continuous challenge to photographic convention throughout his 40-year career, accompanied by texts by the artist and over 60 illustrations. AUTHOR: Duncan Wooldridge is an artist, writer and curator. He is the Course Director for BA (Hons) Fine Art Photography at Camberwell College of Art. His curatorial work includes the two-site group survey exhibition, ‘Anti-Photography’, at Focal Point Gallery and Beecroft Art Gallery, Southend, in 2011, and ‘John Hilliard: Not Black and White’, at Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, in 2014. Duncan writes regularly as a critic and essayist in magazines and books. He has written regularly for Art Monthly, Artforum, Over (PhotoIreland), FOAM Amsterdam, and 1000 Words Photography Magazine. His research concerns the possibilities of critical in and around what Vilem Flusser has called ‘The Universe of Technical Images’: the widespread adoption of mechanically reproducible technologies, such as photography, video, digital text, 3D printing, and printmaking, in a culture of immaterial labour and supposedly dematerialized technologies. He is concerned with the everyday uses of readily available images, especially the reproduction of the work of art, which represents a kind of ‘zero degree’ of the photographic. SELLING POINTS: . Focusing on John Hilliard’s fascination with the monochrome and visual obstruction, this career-spanning volume draws together the artist’s diverse engagement with photography . Using new and pioneering processes, such as overlaying prints and incorporating projector screens, the artist aims to disrupt the viewer’s relationship to the photograph 65 colour illustrations
