1/21/2024 0 Comments Incubator kitchen cape cod![]() ![]() Strickland arrived for her session with strands of gold thread in her wig, their subtle sparkle apparent only upon close inspection of the print. ![]() That open-endedness is responsible for many of the serendipitous details in the images. But while he says he considers what a finished photograph will look like before he takes it, he allows for improvisation and responds to the variables he encounters during a shoot. The precise compositions and formal intricacy of Hilliard’s photographs suggest careful planning and forethought. “I was a film major for a hot minute, but I was told my work was too static,” he says. His background in film and fashion are apparent in the narrative quality of his photographs and their emphasis on the way his subjects present themselves. ![]() “I grew up coming here I came out here I experienced the AIDS epidemic here,” he says. Hilliard’s rapport with his subjects is an extension of his familiarity with Provincetown and its denizens. I think she knew that, so she was insistent about it. She didn’t look like herself without a smile. I asked, ‘Can we do one where you’re not smiling?’ But in the end, the pictures of her smiling really were the best ones. Let’s show you in a moment of repose.’ She loved it. “I told her, ‘Let’s try to make a narrative. “The idea for the portrait sort of snuck up on us,” he says. ![]() Berta Insisting on a Smile shows Provincetown gallerist Berta Walker in a moment of repose. The photograph’s title - Berta Insists on a Smile - provides insight on Hilliard’s collaborative nature. Hilliard’s portrait of gallerist Berta Walker captures its subject in a more genial mood: bathed in sunlight and surrounded by flowers, Walker radiates warmth as she soaks her feet in a bubble-filled washtub. Actress Gail Strickland appears in one of the most arresting images: posed in the kitchen amid produce grown in its garden, Strickland fixes the viewer’s eye with a gaze as sharp as the distractingly large butcher knife she wields. Prominent figures in Provincetown’s cultural landscape are depicted in different rooms. In any given image, there are several different histories working together.” And of course, there’s a lot about me in them. “So, there’s a bit of Ken Fulk in these pictures, too. “I’m interested in both the skin of the original house and the objects that are now in it,” he says. And the house itself is as much a subject of the series as the people shown in it. “The photos are based loosely on Vorse’s life as a freedom fighter, activist, and advocate for women and the disenfranchised,” says Hilliard. Most of the subjects are women or “have a connection to the feminine,” and all are Hilliard’s partners in the creation of what he calls his “collaborative tableaus.” “What’s Done in Shadows” comprises portraits of about two dozen members of the Provincetown community - “an eclectic cast of long-term Provincetown residents, summer workers, artists, writers, performers and other social orphans,” as Hilliard says in a statement accompanying the show - taken in and around Vorse’s former home. In a remarkable new body of work concurrently on view at the Vorse house and at Schoolhouse Gallery (494 Commercial St., Provincetown), photographer David Hilliard extends Vorse’s cultural legacy into the present. Sensitively restored by designer Ken Fulk in 2020, it is now the home of the Provincetown Arts Society - and once again an incubator for cultural life here. The home of a prosperous sea captain in the mid 19th century, it became the locus of the town’s art and literary scene under Vorse’s stewardship before deteriorating into a neglected eyesore after her death in 1966. that she bought in 1907 and lived in for six decades passed through several stages in its history. Similarly, the house at 466 Commercial St. Vorse’s own biography was voluminous: over the course of her long life, she was a journalist, suffragist, social and labor activist, feminist, novelist, and parent. David Hilliard at the kitchen door of the Mary Heaton Vorse house. “Our houses are our biographies, the stories of our defeats and victories,” wrote Mary Heaton Vorse in Time and the Town, her memoir of early 20th-century life in Provincetown. ![]()
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