Written Down / Written Up: Selected Writings of John Hilliard
Book launch and in-conversation
Thursday 8 October, doors 6.30pm, talk 7pm
John Hilliard will be in-conversation with Duncan Wooldridge to mark the launch of Written Down / Written Up, the first comprehensive collection of writings by Hilliard, one of the most inventive artists working in the photographic form.
Offering evolving reflections on photography, language, and conceptual art, from the 1960s to 2025, the publication is richly illustrated throughout and accompanied by an introduction and situating texts by editor Duncan Wooldridge. Includes previously unseen writings alongside published essays, teaching materials, and personal correspondence that form an essential component of Hilliard’s conceptual photographic practice. Published by MACK.
Free, RSVP essential to [email protected]
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John Hilliard, Wrong (1992)
Why do we trust the accuracy of the black-and-white photograph? Why do certain forms of art lend themselves to particular visual hierarchies, and what can be learned from inverting them? How can image and text be understood as co- conspirators and antagonists, amplifying and destabilising the meaning-making potential of the other? Conceptual artist John Hilliard takes up these questions of art theory and practice with a rigorous yet nimble critical stance in texts spanning the mid-1960s to 2025.
Written Down / Written Up offers the first comprehensive collection of writings by John Hilliard, one of the most inventive artists working in the photographic form. Exploring the medium of photography and its role within art, language, and representation, the themes emerging across these texts echo and expand on those of Hilliard’s practice. The publication draws on a wide range of Hilliard’s writing, from previously unpublished texts to notes, published essays, and reviews. This extensively illustrated volume elaborates his critical contributions to how we understand the relationship between the image and its production.
With an introduction and contextualising texts by editor Duncan Wooldridge
John Hilliard, Table for Four (2003)
‘All the work that I have through a use of photography can be seen as a succession of forays launched against the medium itself, picking away at our received assumptions about its representative capability by deploying a series of specific strategies that target by turns elements of its basic grammar – focus, exposure, speed, and so on – usually by nominating one of these characteristics as the only variable within otherwise constant conditions.’
from ‘A Camera Recording Its Own Condition (And Other Stories)’ (1995)
JOHN HILLIARD is an artist who, from an initial sculpture practice, broke new ground in photography by challenging its potential as a representational device and its status in the visual arts, while foregrounding its material specificity. A student at St. Martin’s School of Art, he quickly made a name for himself with his first solo show at the Camden Arts Centre in 1969. In addition to Tate Modern’s critically acclaimed exhibition on conceptual photography, ‘Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art’ (2018), his work is part of the collection of Tate Gallery, London; MoMA, New York; Metropolitan Museum, Tokyo; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Hilliard is an Emeritus Professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London, UK.
DUNCAN WOOLDRIDGE is an artist, writer, and curator who seeks to expand the possibilities of photography and technical images, focusing on matter, experimental method, and photography’s capacity to act or think in a future tense. He is the co-founder of the Global Photographies Network and object | multiple. Wooldridge is a Reader in Photography at the Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of To Be Determined: Photography and the Future (2021), and co-editor, with Lucy Soutter, of The Routledge Companion to Global Photographies (2025).