Hillary Goidell

 

hill@speedfish.com
http://www.speedfish.com/hill

Born in 1968 in Pennsylvania, USA, Hillary Goidell has been living and working in Paris since 1990.

After finishing college in the United States, she moved to France and pursued parallel interests through research in anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and work in various aspects of digital production.

From 1995 to 1998 she formalized links between these two fields by teaching a seminar at the Université de Paris-8 on analyzing interactive works. Following up on her hybrid projects, she often turned to photography to explore the themes guiding her research: public/private space, duality and gesture.

In 2000 she began working at Virtools, a French company that publishes software for creating interactive real-time 3D environments. The software became a valuable means of combining photography and interactivity in her personal work through DUO, an installation currently in progress.

A FEW QUESTIONS FOR HILLARY GOIDELL
by Hannah Lovelake

RUAVISTA: Your photographs were taken with a digital camera and "BODYbuildings" was initially made for the Ruavista website, though 4 of the series were printed for a show at the Galerie Machine Simple in Paris. You're currently working on duo, an interactive installation with photographs acting as dancers in a 3-dimensional choreographic space. Given these projects, what is your relationship to traditional photography methods and to digital techniques? More generally, how does the digital realm change photography for you?

Hillary Goidell: My earliest memories of traditional photography go back to when I was about 8 years old. My older brother was getting his start as a photographer and I followed him around when I could. He put all kinds of equipment in my hands, from pinhole cameras to a Brownie, Nikon F2s and most recently a digital camera much more powerful than the one I'd been using (and still use for certain light and motion effects). My brother let me keep him company in the darkroom and go with him when he covered demonstrations as a photojournalist years later. All that helped give me a broad view of photography as visual research, without making me feel like I had to call myself a photographer.

In the past 10 years I've been working in various ways with computers and interactivity, and I've never felt a clear-cut break between traditional and digital photography. I used my first digital camera to capture ambiences and impressions. The camera had no settings or shutter speeds and took anything I shot, no matter how little light was available. That absence of features sometimes generated surprising textures and volumes… which just shows how technological limitations can often lead to really inventive results.

On a conceptual level, the immaterial aspects of digital photography seem to go hand in hand with the immediacy of the medium. Seeing the results of a picture taken 2 seconds prior offers a chance to retrace your steps - spatially though not temporally - to revisit or see a scene differently. In a more radical way, editing photographs on the fly becomes possible. And in a more practical sense, these aspects bring down the costs of digital photography in a way that tends for some people to be almost inversely proportional to the quantity of work being produced.

But whether you're dealing with traditional or digital photography, the process remains comparable. How far do you take a composition, how much chemical or computer retouching do you do… The main issue for me is subjectivity, and the way in which subjective decisions come to bear on your creative constraints and the work being made.

THE ROLE OF THE BODY

The photographer's body

R. The way the photos are taken makes us think about the photographer's body, with its array of postures and movements. The viewpoint isn't always that of your average passer-by. What specific techniques have you used? Do you set the camera down on the ground or balance it on other objects?

Certain photographs seem to have been taken by people of all different heights, even by non-humans, producing a multiplicity of visions and experiences. What can you tell us about the role played by the body in urban space?

H.G. In relation to the way photographs are made, I think the first word that comes to mind is improvisation. It all depends on the instant and the context, and anything's possible as you approach an object… climbing up on a windowsill, positioning the camera on the ground, crouching down on the sidewalk. Along with the visual goals, it's often the visceral, gut reaction that decides.

I like the idea that an image can actually get someone to experience new or different points of view. That kind of discovery relies on visual cues, but also brings the whole body into play, creating greater awareness of how we move, literally, through our daily life. I'd love to be able to trigger new reactions like that, get people to see things in a new way, twisting and bending to get at objects from unusual angles.

The absence of humans

R. There are almost no human figures, but at the same time there's a proliferation of the marks people have left behind. What's signified by this quasi-disappearance?

H. G. Rather than a disappearance, I'd say there's a hidden presence, something lingering. An object or a person's presence always implies its potential absence, and vice-versa. In my mind, the relationship between presence-absence is what makes the city vibrate: bodies cross paths, meet up with each another then move away, ignore each other and come into conflict. Streets that seem empty are full of passers-by. One minute they don't exist, the next they've come in and taken over our field of view. Sometimes we don't actually distinguish something yet we can perceive its presence, and in that sense the city is full of encounters waiting to happen…

R. Your work is often based on the desire to get as close to objects as possible, as if focusing on the minute as a means of unveiling the city. What importance do you place on detail?

H. G. I'm less interested in details as such than in the concept of level of detail, which influences the way we perceive things. To understand the world around us, we're constantly manipulating the transition between tiny, seemingly insignificant details and the "big picture," in which each element has a role to play in relation to the whole. What fascinates me is the transition between these two states. Objects may be inanimate, but when we juxtapose our different perceptions of them, we're almost able to set them in motion.

R. You sometimes photograph the same building from several angles. Is this an attempt to recompose the object as a whole, or would you rather focus on fragmentary views?

H.G. I am trying to recompose scenes to a certain extent - though juxtaposed fragments of an object are never perceived in the same way as the object when it's seen as a whole. The goal isn't to create a puzzle, but to evoke the visual rhythm you experience when walking down the street, moving through a given context over time. Again, it's neither the fragment nor the whole that counts, but the transition between the two.

THE GRID MOTIF

R. Grids are recurrent in your photos, and seem to be accentuated by the tight color range, stark contrasts between black and white, shadow and light. Why place such importance on the horizontal and the vertical? Is there any relationship to urban models in the US?

H. G. I think it's got more to do with a sense of territory - and that's not a concept reserved only for American cities. Obviously the fact that I grew up in the US means that I'm accustomed to grid-like spaces with streets that run straight from one end of a neighborhood to another and cross other streets at a 90° angle. When I first came to Paris, I found myself following streets which, in my mind, ran parallel to the Seine - only to wind far from the river with no clue exactly how I'd gotten there.

I wasn't particularly trying to include grids in the compositions. Maybe they're so present because they echo things like borders and boundaries which characterize all spaces: neighborhoods, residential areas, parks that close at night, gates and entryways, places transformed from public to private, terraces that encroach on sidewalks like transitional spaces between interior and exterior…

NARRATIVE

R. In presenting the photographs in series, you introduce a very distinct temporal dimension. What role does narrative play? Are you trying to suggest a story? An action or event?

H. G. In the same way that I'm not looking to recompose an object as the sum of its parts, I'm not trying to show details from a series of events in order to tell a specific story. The series are meant to evoke various stories, or actually snippets, like the bits of conversations and sound heard out of context when walking through the city. More than anything, putting the images in series creates a sense of spatial and temporal rhythm. Rather than reassembling a given story, the series try to convey the ambiance of a given situation.

And what's next…? Doing this kind of study gives me a closer look at concepts like rhythm and perception. To get beyond this level, I've wanted to explode the grid that holds the images together. The goal is to let the relationships between the different points of view embodied in the photographs speak for themselves. The project I'm working on, duo, uses interactivity to reinforce this idea, by placing photographs in a 3D environment and letting the viewer set them in motion to discover inherent ties between them.