John T. Hill Photos
The image — to many New Haveners, an iconic one — is so vivid it seems like you can almost hear it, a murmur of voices, maybe a cacophony. Maybe there’s a speaker’s ragged voice echoing across the Green through a bullhorn. The two men standing nearby seem like they’re having a conversation. Is it worry or sarcasm on that man’s face, or something else? The one message that seems clear is coming from the young man’s face, front and center in the picture. His mouth is closed, but his eyes convey so much — even more than the little sign he has pinned to his shirt, that reads “Human Rights Not Violence.”
The image is from the rallies on the New Haven Green in May 1970 during the Black Panther trials. The photograph was taken by John T. Hill, a photographer and graphic designer who was among the faculty of the Yale School of Art and Architecture, having graduated from that school himself. In 1971 he started a standalone department of photography in the school with graphic designer Alvin Eisenman. Hill is perhaps best known for a series of books on the work of famous photographer Walker Evans, who was a fellow faculty member at Yale; Hill became executor of Evans’s estate when Evans died in 1975.
But all through his teaching and writing career, Hill practiced photography himself. Thanks to curator Stephen Kobasa — taking the reins at the Institute Library gallery from Martha Lewis while Lewis is abroad — that work has its own chance in the spotlight. The show, titled “John T. Hill: Persistent Observer,” runs at the Institute Library on Chapel Street through Jan. 15, 2022.
Why was now the time for an exhibition of Hill’s work?
“You mean, why, finally?” Kobasa answered. “He’s an extraordinary photographer, but he’s largely known as an advocate for others,” due to his writing and teaching. “His own work has gone largely unseen.” Kobasa and Hill met about 10 years ago in an art gallery on Chapel Street that Kobasa said now doesn’t exist. Their friendship developed slowly in the years that followed. “There’s a modesty there. You have to invite him to talk about things,” Kobasa said. But as he got familiar with Hill’s photography, he said, “it became quite clear that there was a body of work here that should be made public.”
Hill’s May Day photographs, which he published jointly with photographer Tom Strong as a chronicle of the events surrounding the trials, “are the ones that are best known,” Kobasa said. He included the image in the exhibit “partially to remind people, to have a point of reference. And I think it’s just a remarkable photograph in and of itself.”
But Hill’s work spans decades, and encompasses a good deal of travel as well. Among the photographs in the show is one Hill took in Santa Monica, Calif., which is both a documentary street scene and, thanks to Hill’s angling to put a streetlamp pole in just the right place, an adventurous composition. The pole covers up the corner where the wall running along the sidewalk turns (presumably something like) 90 degrees, and without that reference point, suddenly there’s no obvious place for the eye to land and get its bearings, to vertiginous, almost funhouse effect.
But, importantly, the Santa Monica photograph and others like it in Hill’s catalog “aren’t abstractions,” Kobasa said. “Obviously his compositions have abstract elements, but that’s not his focus. That’s a means to another end, and that’s what has always fascinated me about his work.”
And what, to Kobasa, are those ends? Part of the answer to that is something Kobasa wants to leave up to viewers in their own experiences of Hill’s images. This runs counter to the trend in art shows these days, which are often accompanied by a great deal of explanation from accompanying notes. Taken too far, and a show runs the risk of feeling like “there’s a series of puzzles and you’re going to be handed the solutions at the door,” Kobasa said. “I think over-explanation can be condescending in a way. You can’t create experiences. People are where they are — some things will be immediately available, and some are not. It’s just the nature of what our encounters with art are like…. Some things will remain mysterious. Some things, you’ll see visions that even the artists didn’t see.”
Without accompanying explanation, though, another effect is to be able to walk a little bit in Hill’s shoes — to see what he saw at the time without the mediation of an explanation afterward. “He just walked through the world making pictures,” Kobasa said. “It’s not like he plotted out a narrative in advance.” His work “emerged from the encounters that he had. His patience, his waiting for the image to present itself” is part of what makes the images as engrossing as they are. “He places himself in the world,” Kobasa continued, and “the generosity he had for his subjects — not just the people, but the places, his sense of dimension and locale,” come to the fore.
Hill gave Kobasa final say in which images made it into the show and which didn’t. “I made the choices, and we talked about those,” Kobasa said. “There was some dialogue, some negotiating back and forth. There were things that mattered very much to him that I wanted to show.” And to Kobasa, there was “an embarrassment of riches” to choose from. “But there are moments that just show. There were images that distilled his way of looking. Could there have been substitutes? Could it” — meaning the entire show — “have been larger? Sure. But I think that it’s true to his project, of why he made photographs at all.”
Because Hill trained his eye and camera on what interested him, whether he was in California, or Rome, or — as in this image directly above — Savin Rock. This particular image of a young man warily looking back at the camera “stayed with me” when it came time to select photographs for the show, Kobasa said. As with many of Hill’s images, the Savin Rock picture is part documentary; the amusement park we catch a glimpse of in the background doesn’t exist anymore, as the park closed in 1967 and the last ride was demolished in 1969. But it’s also capturing a moment in time, a particular aligning of small events, that come together to make the image what it is.
“All the photographers that matter show us something we wouldn’t have seen otherwise, and John does it over and over again,” Kobasa said. A working artist himself, Kobasa explained that Hill’s work has affected “my own way of looking.” Mostly, Hill’s work “slowed me down, it slowed down my progress in the world, which is probably a good thing.”
“You stop and make an image, you have to look — longer than the usual scheme of our culture allows for. All of his photographs are a lesson of what it means to stop and look, and what you might discover as a result,” Kobasa continued. “It makes the looker have to take responsibility…. It doesn’t matter how much you see. It’s how well you see things,” so that “the things that you do see, you see in a way that you’ll remember.”
“John T. Hill: Persistent Observer” runs at the Institute Library, 847 Chapel St., through Jan. 15, 2022. Visit the library’s website for hours and more information.
Recognition for John Hill and his work is long overdue, so thank you bringing his work more into the public eye! Beyond his work as a photographer, I want to note John's steadfastness as a friend and colleague to those he worked with. I can think of none better!