jeffrey hawkins

Photography

  • Growing up in rural Vermont, I learned early on that the best way to experience life—and survive the long winters—was to grab my gear and get out there. That gear usually included some kind of ‘stick’—hockey or lacrosse—but sometimes it was a pencil or paintbrush.

    I was working toward my BFA in Painting at the University of Colorado Denver when an introductory photography class ignited my passion for the medium, thus determining my future as a photographer, forever changed the contents of my gear bag.

  • My photography is driven by human interaction and connection to place. I love to connect with people and places, and to tell their stories through my work. I am known for drawing out people's personalities and helping them feel comfortable in front of the camera, something not all are used to. An early interest in street art as a painter has continued to influence my work in street photography and using the urban landscape as my canvas.

    I am familiar with photographic mediums from analog black and white film to digital photography and large-scale digital printing, and have studied historical photographic processes. Currently my work combines the uses of analog wet process film photography and the use of digital scanning to create large-scale inkjet prints.

artist

statement


I create work dealing with human interaction in urban spaces. By using 6x7 medium format black and white film, my series Together/Alone explores images created on the street using single and double exposures to investigate how the cities inhabitants move through designed spaces. While exploring how people traverse the urban landscape, I am drawn to strangers and the way they interact with one another and their surroundings, how our lives overlap. Growing up in a rural environment, I am interested in the stark contrast between the rolling hills of my childhood in central Vermont and city life in Denver.

Life is chaotic and busy; people come in and out of our lives on a daily basis, some we get to know personally, on an intimate level, while some pass by never to utter a word or be seen again. From the train on our commute, to a cross walk, to the local coffee shop, it is these spaces that bring the webs of our lives together, stranger or friend our lives are constantly intertwining.

We live in a digital world, for better or worse where people interact with one another from great distances and distribute information with ease. However, many people disappear into their computers and smart phones, becoming recluse from the world. When shooting in analog film, I think differently compared to photographing with my digital camera. I am more methodical with each composition as it is expensive and time consuming. I must consider each frame and interact with each subject. In connecting the past with the present, the analog and the digital, I translate my images to inkjet prints by scanning each negative digitally. My doing so I am interested in creating a comment on the digital saturation of our modern technologies and the transition from analog processes to a digitally dominated word.