Personal Statement
In my photography, I try to capture moments of life that take us away from the busy-ness that steals our sense of connection to God, to each other, and to the world around us. You will find very few humans in the photographs, beyond those galleries specifically dedicated to people, preferring to track the patterns and 'leavings' that our presence has left behind. I hope to capture something that reaches beyond the object, to the emotion -- the presence of God -- in it, and in us.
I work primarily in black and white, though some images simply demand the presence of color in order to capture its message. A rainbow showering down upon a shack in the Nevada wilderness simply would not demand of us the same attention -- or elicit the same emotion -- if rendered in black and white. For these photographs, the color gallery has a few of my favorites. My business career has taken me to places that I only imagined as a younger man. You will find images of the things and places from those travels -- six continents in all -- Sydney and Melbourne in Austrailia, Wellington in New Zealand, Amsterdam in the Netherlands, London, Brussels, Venice and Rome, Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, Mexico City, Sao Paulo and 40 other cities and 9 other countries; I hope you enjoy the results of my travel and my work.
About Michael Hill
I am primarily a self-taught photographer, though the New York Institute of Photography and the International Center for Photography represent my formal training. However, the most valuable training I have received comes the excellent texts such as: George DeWolfe's "Digital Photography Fine Print Workshop" and "B&W Printing", Amadau Diallo's "Mastering Digital Black and White", Dan Burkholter's "Making Digital Negatives for Contact Printing" and of course Ansel Adams "The Camera", "The Negative", and "The Print". For understanding how to apply the Zone System for Black and White images in Photoshop, I have found Chris Johnson's book "The Practical Zone System: for Film and Digital Photography" to be immensely useful.
I live in Benicia, California, arriving here in 2010, as a part of a always interesting and somewhat nomadic life. For those who ask where I am from, they are often treated with a puzzled look, one of the questions I never know really how to answer. I was born in Seattle, Washington but have lived in California (Vallejo, Monterey, San Diego), Rhode Island (Newport), Virginia (Virginia Beach), Oklahoma (Moore, Lindsay, Durant), Kansas (Medicine Lodge, Derby) Texas (The Woodlands) and Iceland (Keflavik). At 51, having lived in fourteen different cities, "where I am from" only accounts for an average of 3 years of my life.
I have been photographing for over 20 years, but the work you see represented here is the result of a study in earnest that began in 2005. This website is the evolution of the first instance of a web presence that began with www.mhill-images.com (2009) (currently still active). I am a self-trained photographer, but I will give the credit for any native artistic talent to my mother, Helen Hill. She was in her mid-40's before she first picked up a paint brush, but before her death at 53, she had not only learned to paint but her special talent with the eyes of her subjects made them come alive. If there is anything I may have inherited from her, I prefer to think it is her 'eye' for life's details.
I work exclusively with Hahnemuhle archival papers and Jon Cone's Piezography inks. For more information on the technical aspects of the prints, click here.
I hope you enjoy the photographs and find something here of interest to keep you coming back. I would greatly appreciate any feedback that you might have on improving this website.