Board_Advisors_etc 3..5

maintain the vital link of creation at a time when,
on the one hand, contemporary art is more eso-
teric than ever and, on the other, consumerism
triumphs in mass culture.

JEANKempf

Seealso:Farm Security Administration; Photogra-
phy in France; Visual Anthropology

Biography

Born in Brussels 1943. Co-founder of Viva, 1972. ‘‘Inter-
iors,’’ Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1981. 1983–
1989: Directs the Mission photographique de la
DATAR. 1990: manages the ‘‘new patrons’’ project for
the Fondation de France. Director, Hartung Founda-
tion, 1984. Living in Antibes and Paris, France.

Individual Exhibitions

1981 Interieurs; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

Group Exhibitions

1986 Chambres d’amis;Ghent, Belgium

Further Reading

Inte ́rieurs. Bruxelles: Editions des archives d’architecture

moderne, 1981.

Hers, Franc ̧ ois, Jean-Franc ̧ ois Chevrier, and Roman Cie-

slewicz.Re ́cit. Jumet: Graphing, 1983. Published in Eng-

lish as:A Tale. London: Thames and Hudson, 1983.

[Mission photographique de la DATAR].Paysages, photo-

graphies. Paris: Hazan, 1989.

Le Protocole. Dijon: Presses du re ́el, 2002.

http://www.nouveauxcommanditaires.org (accessed June

19, 2005).

JOHN HILLIARD

British

Conceptual artist John Hilliard first began to use
photography as a student during the 1960s. Initially,
the camera was a means to document his temporary
site-specific installations, but Hilliard soon recog-
nized that the metonymic power of the photographic
image deserved more serious examination. In realiz-
ing that the camera was not simply a neutral device
for recording fact, the artist began exploring the
language and history of the medium of photography.
He established a challenge to expose the myth of
photographic truth, a form of rigorous visual and
intellectual inquiry emblematic of Conceptual Art
and Minimalism in the late 1960s. Hilliard started
questioning the selective methods of image making
and confronted the ways photographic meaning
could be manipulated.
By the early 1970s, after time spent traveling in the
United States and further guided by critical theory
and semiotics, Hilliard began to work exclusively
with photography. A representative work from
these early years of inquiry,Camera Recording Its
Own Condition, 1971, is a sequence of seventy black-
and-white images presented in a grid-like quasi-

scientific fashion, showing the reflection of a camera

at the moment the photograph is taken. Each image

differs slightly, as Hilliard changed both the speed

and aperture, thus creating a range of legibility from

light to dark, depending on the over- or under-expo-

sure of the image. At the center of the grid, an image

suggests itself as the ‘‘correct’’ exposure. Such self-

referential imagery indicates Hilliard’s concern with

the mechanics of photography, actions that para-

doxically reveal the intervention of the photographer

in the camera’s supposedly objective realm.

Similarly, inCauses of Death, 1974, Hilliard scru-

tinized the photographer’s subjective editing process

through a series of four black-and-white images of

what appears to be a sheet-covered dead body prone

on a rocky landscape. While obviously depicting the

same subject from the same angle, each photograph

is cropped a little differently to create a new context

of meaning for each image, suggesting a different

cause of death. Other projects by Hilliard from this

fertile period in the 1970s—concerning a considera-

tion of focus, film speed, and technical darkroom

decisions with regards to paper and developing—

again exposed the fallibility of photography as an

objective or evidentiary medium.

HILLIARD, JOHN