Hillary Irene Johnson

Dream of a Lagoon

This photograph is taken behind the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago. a human built landscape in violation of treaties.
8" x 10" view camera
Paper Negative - silver gelatin print

I use this 19th-century process both with the view camera and the paper as a means of slowing down the act of perception, which leads to making the photograph. The impulse to make an image comes from a process of slow looking, attending to internal experience, which is seeking an outward expression. This happens both formally, in how I am composing and choosing the places I am going, but also as a way of pushing back against the speed of digital technology, fraught as it is given the entangled webs of extraction technologies and companies whose successes are based in privately held profits often at the expense of the communities across their supply chains and other loci of work.

My choice to use these materials rather than digital media reflects a desire to mindfully use with care the physical materials required. It also represents a closer relationship to the natural world, which is its source, trees, water, etc. I also am thinking about the way that method I use for making images is tied directly to notions of slowness. The ISO of the paper is about 3, meaning my exposures often take minutes, lending a temporal quality to the work, which creates a very different kind of image than a smart and fast digital camera would never be able to produce.

We see the passage of time in a very special way. The parts of the landscape which are more fixed, the heavier parts of the tree, are in sharp focus throughout the picture plane, while the water and the reflections give a dreamy quality to the image. This invites the viewer to consider the landscape and their relationship with it, to live in reciprocity rather than greed, not as a colonist just moving through but as an indigenous being entwined with all others now & in the future.

From the Think Resilience course, Social Justice / Equity / Ownership: “A truly resilient community must foster equity and democracy, as well as ecological renewal."
2023
  • Hillary Johnson

View of a Suburban Pond

8" x 10" view camera
wet plate collodion, silver gelatin print

I used the collodion in this image both for its formal qualities, the smooth, grainless image, but also for its challenge to make a good glass plate and the alchemy of the process required, which feels so alchemical which references by feeling that the time we are in does ask of us a certain path is the alchemy of coming together to ask the big questions the course is asking us to consider.

This image was made in an area of communal property within a larger private space in a suburb outside of Chicago. It looks wild and is home to many creatures yet is surrounded by private homes and lawns which are not ecologically appropriate for the area. So there are tensions inherent in the image.

I also use the collodion as a nod to the early days of photography which also coincide with the beginning of the anthropocene, which might be thought of as the beginning of our time entering the great acceleration into technologies, the use of which propel us faster and faster into event horizons of seeking which we barely understand and are clearly with their dangers.

The content of this part of the course calls into question the matter of commons, both cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, over those which are privately owned tensions which I hope this image begins to address both formally and conceptually.

"Everyone who used the commons had a stake in preserving it for the next generation. During and especially after the Middle Ages in Britain and then Europe, common lands were gradually enclosed with fences and claimed as private property by people who were wealthy and powerful enough to be able to defend this appropriation by law and force of arms. The American suburb presents an iteration of this set of challenges and that is one of the things in my investigations." –Richard Heinberg,  Community Resilience and Social Justice / Equity / Ownership.
2023
  • Hillary Johnson

The Dream of Reciprocity

PhotographNova Scotia, Canada

I think of this portrait as a visual representation of inter-being with the commons of the land.

The image was made in a part of Canada that has been subject to all kinds of trauma, which has largely been created by extractive practices of fishing, logging, manufacturing, etc. These systems break the land and the individuals who reside there. The traumas are passed on generationally amongst the people and on the land and all of the many beings who dwell there.

These communities, when functionally properly, flow in perfect reciprocity, exist in balance, thriving and surviving far into the future, into the 7th generation. When we are out of balance, taking more than is needed, with action based on greed and harmful privatization, this is how we arrive at our current moment.

This photo is an invitation using the visual metaphor, seeing the water, air, trees, and humans as entwined. I hope a dream we can still realize.

PART IV: BUILDING COMMUNITY RESILIENCE Community Resilience and Social Justice / Equity / Ownership

"Meanwhile, there are specific, immediately accessible ways to build equity in our communities through common ownership. One way is through the promotion of cooperative enterprises. The original purpose of corporations was to pool capital to achieve socially useful but risky purposes, like building a bridge or roadway. Cooperatives—or co-ops—pool capital as well, but they are owned by their workers and/or customers, thereby granting ownership to the very people most involved and interested in the enterprise. And cooperatives have a long history of success. Credit unions are cooperative banks; some utility companies operate as cooperatives, and there are also housing, manufacturing, and agricultural cooperatives. The thousands of cooperatives across America deliberately foster voluntary and open membership, democratic member control, member economic participation, cooperation among cooperatives, and concern for the community." –Richard Heinberg,  Community Resilience and Social Justice / Equity / Ownership.
2023
  • Hillary Johnson

The Veil is Thin (When We Look and When We Don’t)

Slow motion video excerpt from longer ongoing investigations with sound gathered from the location.
Gold sparkle tulle intervention in the landscape between the shack and the Wisconsin River at the @aldoleopoldfoundation in Baraboo, WI.

The land where I made this intervention and photo is part of ecosystem resilience work being done at the foundation. They strive to balance a respect for history with deep listening to the ecological needs of the land now and in the future.

The foundation fosters climate and eco-education in community with programs and practices in resilience. This intervention and video was inspired by the intersection of the foundation's landscape choices and deep commitment to education for future generations.

A delusion or confusion that seems to prevail is a notion of separation from everything that is not ‘us’, by which I mean all of nature, all of the universe, all of “the great absorbing stream of the world,” as poet Mark Doty puts it.

Do we live with a veil over in front of our eyes? A veil which until we recognize it, prevents us from seeing clearly.

Might a veiled view lead us to act in ways that are harmful to ourselves, to the planet, to all those with whom we share this time and place? Are our thoughts, words and actions creating repeating patterns or cycles of suffering?

This work explores, through the sensuous pleasures of seeing, veiling and unveiling, texture, moving and weaving through space, ways of experiencing oneself in relationship to ourselves and all that appear to be distinct or separate from us. This work offers viewers a chance to experience presence as a way of recognizing and intentionally being in connection with ourselves and all around us. When we can experience true presence, clarity and alignment arises and our inclinations shift.
2022
  • Hillary Johnson

Thought Form: The Divine Revealed in its Own Time

Inkjet print
10" x 10" overall
Limited Edition of 5, 2AP

Much in the same way that “sustainability is not a steady state, because nothing in nature persists unchanged. A sustainable society must be able to adapt to new conditions—and that means resilience.” This piece looks at how all our states change continually. We may feel fragmented one moment and see more clearly our interdependence and connection in the next. The work of cultivating that awareness is ongoing. The more we practice, the easier it is to do.
  • Hillary Johnson

The Veil We See Through Makes Things Unclear

Photograph of fabric intervention in an urban landscape
Inkjet print
13” x 19”Limited Edition of 5, 2 AP

This work offers viewers a chance to experience presence as a way of recognizing and intentionally being in connection with ourselves and all around us. When we can experience true presence, clarity and alignment arise and our inclinations shift.
2022
  • Hillary Johnson

The Veil We See Through Makes Things Unclear II

Fractured Panorama Photograph made by moving the camera to mimic the movements of climate change data with fabric intervention in an urban landscape
Inkjet print
50” x 11”

This piece explores a confusion that seems to prevail, a notion of separation from everything that is not ‘us.” The glitches which occur in the making of the image, moving through the veil are a way of representing the feeling of the disturbances we experience from consumption, consumerism, and competitive modes of living.

When we begin to develop greater clarity we can see that “Not only is there no conflict between sustainability and resilience, there is mutual support between the two. A major factor in building resilience in human systems is making them less likely to produce future disturbances—in other words, making them more sustainable.”
2022
  • Hillary Johnson

The Golden Thread in Question

Fractured Panorama Photograph
Inkjet print
9" x 15"

With this work, I am thinking about the golden thread of awareness, of the witnessing consciousness which runs through all things, of the tentative threads of compassion, of awareness of our shared existence and fate, which when we acknowledge it, can urge us to be kinder and more resilient.
2022
  • Hillary Johnson

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