Jim Hair
Artist Statement
I share Frederick Douglass’ belief; photography is truly a democratic art, and in the “moral and social influence of pictures.”
For fifty years, I’ve worked in the tradition of Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine. My current preferred camera is a 1953 Speed Graphic 4x5, using Ilford FP4 film.
My interest is to document societies’ outsiders; people whose lives and work enrich a world where they may not be accepted as the norm.
I see 2020 as a year of transition, and during the global pandemic have tried to document the personal and public efforts to change our world.
Artist Bio
Raised by my maternal grandparents, I began making photographs in the 1960’s with the encouragement of my grandmother whose brother, Jack Wilkes was a staff photographer for LIFE Magazine in China during World War Two.
I learned to process film at the Naval Training Center in San Diego as a teenager, and met informally with Wynn Bullock during college.
My photographs have been published internationally and the New York Times, and included in the archives at Special Collections, McHenry Library, University of California at Santa Cruz, and the San Francisco Public Library Historical Photograph Collection.
