After Words

John Hilliard February 2013

Pre-scription

While still at art school, making sculpture, I often commenced from a fully fledged vision, a mental image of a completed work, given preliminary substance through a rough sketch or diagram (to preserve it from forgetfulness and to serve as a basic prescription for its subsequent materialisation). Such drafting is a commonplace within the creative process of artists and designers (Renzo Piano’s ‘Shard’ building in London reputedly originated as a sketch on the back of a menu in a Berlin restaurant), although perhaps not so readily associated with photography. Even so, there are instances from within the diversity of that medium, as when the art director of an advertising campaign produces a visual guide for a stills photographer. My own use of drawing in relation to photography (a direct continuation of its original deployment for sculptural purposes) may be comparable to that example, although doubtless less skilled. In Aspects No.16 (1981, Newcastle-upon-Tyne) I published an article called ‘Drawings (In Anticipation) Of Photographs’, describing a practice in which photographs are pre-visualised through drawing, in contradistinction to a more common order of procedure where artists use photographs as a reference source from which to produce drawings and paintings (a convention that I also eventually found the need to employ, albeit for unorthodox ends).

Since the late-1960s, this relationship between a prescriptive drawing and a completed image has characterised all my photographic work. However, commencing in 2002, in a series of pieces comprising multiple exposures of the same subject from different points of view (so that distinct profiles are aligned or misaligned within a composite whole), drawing is deeply embedded as an underlying structure. Specifically, the analogy of drawing something and then re-drawing it, again and again, to ‘get it right’, is central to the thinking behind this particular project.

Post-scription

Having previously drawn a rough likeness of my own photographs before ever commencing on their production, I now decided first to re-draw the finished images and then to make photographic prints from those drawings, establishing a repetitive chain of transcription from drawing to photograph to drawing to photograph. In other words, the end product would now be a photograph of a drawing of a photograph from a drawing. One objective in doing this was to direct attention to drawing as a core component in the conception and execution of these particular works, and to give emphasis to the