"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
For more than twenty years, I have been returning to my earliest photographic subject, my family home. This is the house in Los Angeles where my grandmother lived and it is now where my mother lives. The images I’ve made here form an ongoing archive that details the everyday experience of a place in which I am at once an intimate and an observer. In order to produce these photographs, I transform black-and-white negatives into copper plate photogravures and print them by hand with printer’s ink on gampi – a translucent, handmade paper that is as thin and imperfect as human skin. The resulting works are as much objects as they are images. The varying colors of the ink and gampi add another dimension, shading familiar scenes in an unfamiliar light, heightening the emotions that imbue the spaces where we live.
Because I live in New York, I only visit the house a few times a year, meaning that I rely on memory to guide me in the realization of this work, allowing the colors of ink and paper I choose to restore my impressions of a particular moment, a certain arrangement of light and shadow, of presence and absence. These patterns extend over many years, until it becomes difficult to disentangle the present from the past, the room you’re standing in from the room you remember. This process reframes my own subjectivity. I see the world I once knew as only I can see it.
—Stephen Hilger
All works: photogravures on gampi, 25” x 21”, unique. From top to bottom: Bedroom (1998/2021), Lamp (1998/2008), Medicine Cabinet (1998/2008), Sleeping in the Lanai (1998/2003), Weeping Fig I (2020/2021), Fig Tree (1998/2003), Pool (1998/2003), Shield (2020/2021), Weeping Fig III (2020/2021), Weeping Fig II (1998/2021).