John Hesketh
This interview is more personal than most, as I have known John Hesketh for over ten years now. During that time, the volume of work he has created, the opportunities he has provided for others, and the professional relationships he has nurtured are truly remarkable. I suspect he would be a bit uncomfortable with this recognition, as he is quite humble, but it's important for him to hear it, as well as for anyone interested in this interview. I also have to apologize for the extended period of time it has taken me to conduct this interview and put it out to the masses. We'd been talking about it for about a year, but I'm happy we've accomplished this goal.
Hesketh makes art that comes straight from the heart and is an absolute act of love. It is deeply personal and has the ability to resonate with people in a truly genuine way. As an artist, educator, and business owner, he has the thought process and insights that any creative would want to connect with. He is a stand-up figure in my local Southern California community, though his influence and talents transcend far beyond that, and it was a pleasure working with him on this interview. So grab a cup of whatever makes you happy, relax, and enjoy these words and images from a true original.
Luisa #66, from Los Angeles
Bio -
John Hesketh (b.1955) is an artist based in Anaheim, California. John uses multiple and extended exposures, often working in front of the camera to perform with light. Each work is a constructed tableau to explore the unconscious and rummage through the nature of chance.
John has taught photography at Orange Coast College for 25 years and, more recently, at Santa Monica College. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. His art is found in many public and private collections, including Principal Financial (Des Moines, IA), the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside, Maison Europeenne de la Photographie (Ville de Paris), and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.
Interview -
Michael Kirchoff: I know your father had quite an impact on your artistic journey. Can you tell us more about that, and if there were any other art/photo heroes of yours that helped you develop your work?
John Hesketh: My parents founded their studio after my father graduated from the Art Center School of Design in 1954. Early childcare and babysitting were on-site, allowing me to entertain myself with the equipment and chemistry. By the 5th grade, I had a job after school or on weekends, a traditional expectation in the family business. I could play in the studio and darkrooms and look at prints. Our family photos were boxes and boxes of 4x5, 8x10, and 16x20 prints.
The creative community that worked for or with the studio became my extended family, shaping my photographic awareness. However, the long hours, focus on commercial photography, and conflicts with my father made it unappealing. Despite sharing his aesthetic appreciation, my dad did not appreciate the fine art photography culture, which made no sense to me. My dad’s roommate at Art Center was Lee Friedlander, who he never stayed in touch with, while my mother closely followed Lee’s career. This strange division fueled my fascination with photography as art.
In 1980, I co-founded a competing studio, which did not sit well with my father. I was able to work on my own art and ideas between commercial projects, developing computer and optical imaging for business graphics and computer-animated multi-projection presentations. My world was opening up to the color works of John Divola, Lucas Samaras, Barbara Kasten, and Jerry Burchfield.
MK: What would you say is the overall aesthetic or theme of your work? Is this a departure at all from where you started out in the industry?
JH: My painful relationship with my father inspired me to escape his control and find more expressive ways to process the family issues. I work on long-term projects. Two to three years seems short to me, and the work is always process-oriented with some personal narrative or exploration. The project starts out with “What would it look like if I …” Then I construct a process strategy that embraces chance and a performative narrative. I’m fascinated with how we look at a photograph as reality and the tension that it really is an illusion. Whether it’s one long exposure or multiple exposures, I’m looking to place myself in front of a still camera or behind a moving camera to explore the photograph’s ability to interpret my performance and illicit emotional resonance with the viewer. I live in a bottle of photography. My work is a personal expression of family, community, and our rituals of belonging.
MK: Following the riots in Los Angeles in 1992, you created an exhaustive body of work named after the city itself, Los Angeles. Having moved back to my hometown of L.A. several days prior to this difficult event, I witnessed the city self-destruct in a painful parade of personal and professional loss, questions of identity with a city I called home, and degradation of community moving at an ever-rapid pace. Let’s just say that I can relate. How did this work emerge from those ashes, and what was the overarching result of the finalization of the project?
JH: I can’t believe that it was over thirty years ago. We forget that the internet was infantile; most news was broadcast from Mt. Wilson, and cell phones were just phones. Digital photography was an experiment. Rodney King was beaten on my birthday, March 3, 1991. By the time the jury’s verdict was read at the end of April 1992, I felt the city’s name, Los Angeles, had lost its original meaning in the media. Many parts of the city slipped into self-immolation. From the beginning of May 1992, many artists responded, creating work for peace and understanding. I started wondering what my Los Angeles would look like. I created the first angel with my wife, then my children, neighbors, and the people I worked with. Like small circles of intimacy radiating out. Then the project expanded to include my creative community. That’s when it really took off. Artists started recommending other artists and their friends. By 2007, I decided to stop at 100 angels. To bring the project to conclusion with a flourish, the 101st angel would be me. I asked ten of my previous angels to light and photograph my session as the last angel. My son Sean operated the camera while these chosen angels were given assignments to light different parts of my angel during the long 45-minute exposure. For me it was a closure to Los Angeles.
The conceit of Los Angeles is to realize that we all are at the center of our own community. Each of our communities are a united voice for peace and understanding. My current work Los Angeles (revisited), is a reissue of the same angels printed as illuminated icons on vellum with silver and gold leaf, illuminating the same call for peace and understanding 30 years later. We need this now as much we did in 1992.
Amy #94, from Los Angeles
Dierdre #72, from Los Angeles
Doug #79, from Los Angeles
John #26, from Los Angeles
Rachel #59, from Los Angeles
MK: You are working quite intuitively during the process of making each photograph in this series. What do you feel guided you along the way? Were there discussions with the participants that helped you tell their story through the use of wardrobe, props, light, and color? While all similar at first glance, each is quite distinct. I also wonder about the need to continue this journey through 101 final images. What kept you going?
JH: Photography is an expression of my intuitive self. Maybe this is because of the chaos in my family and the relationship I have with photography. I’ve always felt confident speaking in light and process. My use of performance allows me to subvert the precision of exposure, composition, and process that I grew up with. At a young age I felt like I was standing in the shallow side or clinging to the edge of the pool with the rest of the photographers. I wanted to float and swim in the deep end with the artists and painters. I always wanted to be something else, but now I’ve realized that I’m an artist trapped in a photographer’s body. I’m OK with that.
For Los Angeles and a previous body of work, Cul-de-sac, I would open the shutter and step into the scene, performing while marking with light. I never allow the light to shine directly back at the camera. My loose exposure settings would be f22 with no filter or f/11 with a filter while the shutter was open. Everything was photographed analog using a 4x5 sheet, or three sheets of 8x10 Ektachrome 64T film. The shutter would close when I intuitively knew the performance was done.
Los Angeles starts when I ask the subject if they want to be an angel. I explained that they needed to stand still in the dark with me for about 45 minutes. If they agree, then I give them permission to wear whatever they want or as little as they want, but they need to wear a hat. They were also encouraged to bring any other personal objects as well. When they arrived at the studio, we would talk about their items and their thoughts for their angel. After arranging the personal items and clothing, I would say, “Take a comfortable stance, relax, and breathe normally. Your body will settle and wilt. I’m here to interpret that. And don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.” Many of my subjects recalled the experience as a meditative inward journey at the center of lights flashing, swirling, and beaming into ethereal space. They gave up their identity while the angel assumed their persona, and together, in the dark, we would discover the angel.
I had a few fainters and others that showed up maybe a little under the weather, but every angel was completed regardless of their condition. The most asked question was, what if the angel doesn’t turn out the way I like it? My response was, “There’s no wing envy in my Los Angeles.”
MK: The latest body of work I have seen from you is The Presence of Absence. This is yet another deeply personal and emotional series. Can you tell us about this, and then something about the difficulties and benefits of presenting work from the heart to its intended audience? I would imagine this would be both harrowing, yet cathartic, at the same time.
JH: The Presence of Absence grew out of my own deep frustration. I felt a lack of language as a person going through the grieving process when I lost my wife and artistic partner of 42 years. I needed a more authentic word. I came up with GONNESS. Two years later, I used it in my mother’s eulogy, “I don’t really know how to spell it. You can’t find it in the dictionary, but I know its definition. It’s the presence of absence.” As artists, it’s a gift to turn our grieving process into an intimate conversation with our creative process. For me, photography has always been my sanctuary in expressing my deepest thoughts and feelings.
The Presence of Absence started as a visual experiment based on the dye-transfer color printing technique I learned while growing up around the color printing labs in greater Los Angeles. You create black-and-white images or records that correspond to the red, green, and blue layers of film. You then contact print them onto cyan, magenta, and yellow dye matrices. When the matrices are combined back together using precise registration, the color image is reproduced on a fiber-based paper. The final piece is beautiful.
Starting as a dare from my wife in 2012, I used these principles of the dye transfer process and took it a bit further. I would lock down the largest resolution camera I could borrow. In the early days, it was John Upton’s Nikon. The camera is fixed and focused on the blank 40”x 60” stucco wall to maintain the registration of each black and white image (record) that would result from that evening’s session. Using a long exposure, 30 to 90 seconds, I would open the shutter and step in front of the camera to mark light onto the wall using a small flashlight attached to a long stick. Throughout the night and into the morning I would scrape light across the stucco creating hundreds of black and white images with the intent to combine them later to make color abstractions. Many of the marks of light made sense blended with color in stacks of multiple exposures. The curds of the stucco, with the accuracy of my camera set-up, allowed me to have colors vibrate next to each other. But, every once in a while, there would be black and white images with volumes of luminosity that stood out and refused to combine, unlike the other images that needed each other.
In 2012, our lives as a couple became very small. Peggy was in conversations with Putnam and Sons, editing her first novel while taking chemotherapy for breast cancer. Between the brain fog and the rewrites, we still were able to cling to our artistic collaboration. Our discussions bounced around how to keep the imagery of the lawn crosses in her novel and understanding what to do with the unexpected black-and-white images in this new color project of mine. By 2017, her first novel (Telling the Bees by Peggy Hesketh) was a success, and she was declared cancer-free, but in 2018, she died from a sudden heart attack. Everything just stopped.
I had decided to sell our house, and along with it, the wall. In the week before the sale of the house, I returned to the wall to finish our conversation. This time, I used a large PhaseOne camera with a 100mp achromatic digital back with the intent of extending the project. I completed eight more evening sessions before turning over the keys. The experience of being alone at night in our empty house, marking my grief in light across the stucco wall, was powerful and complete. Believing in the work, I prepared the work for portfolio reviews. After a couple of unsuccessful starts I realized showing the color and black and white together became too much process to explain. The color work I had started before my wife’s passing was hard to explain and didn’t seem to fit with the black and white. I decided to just discuss the black-and-white work and rewrote my project statement to reflect the deepest part of the grief I was experiencing. Presenting the work was very hard, but I believed in its authenticity. The simpler presentation made for a few awkward moments of truth, and it connected better with the reviewers.
This monochromatic phase of the project was known for a while as Passage. It allowed me to slow down and explore a new syntax through its abstractions. An image of the wall became a word. If I were to crop to a square of a detail in the wall felt like a syllable. I took this one more step by combining multiple walls attached side by side, and I referred to these as a phrase. This new abstractions of syllables, words, and phrases curated the placement of the art for exhibition and extended the range to my personal narrative for this first part of what would become The Presence of Absence. Portfolio reviewers appreciated the variety of images that came from one wall and its simplicity of story.
Entanglement, from The Presence of Absence
Spark, from The Presence of Absence
Seduction, from The Presence of Absence
Separation, from The Presence of Absence
Coil, from The Presence of Absence
The stucco wall.
MK: What started as a strictly black and white series eventually entered into a color phase. What brought about this change and transformation as part of the journey of processing loss?
JH: With time and after healing with the black and white work, The color returned. It wasn’t that my grieving process was over, but a new phase of my grief was beginning to express itself. Out of gratitude and forgiveness, I allowed myself to discover a new color palette for The Presence of Absence. I photographically sampled colors from the flowers of my new garden. Working with a new palette of dahlias, iris, sweet peas, and English roses, I was able to create new works of color that evolved from a different phase of my grieving process.
The color compositions came from an authentic place, which allowed them to be compatible with the black-and-white photographs that preceded them. I’m currently experimenting with installations of very large vinyl wall adhesives for the color work, along with the framed black-and-white images with no glazing. The combination of color and monochrome reflects my natural rhythms with the grieving process. I vacillate back and forth from the passage of my deepest grief to the release that comes with acceptance and forgiveness. This is the way the art healed me.
I have since connected with other artists who have found their way through grief with their art, including Laurie Peek and Susan Rosenberg Jones. We all feel grateful to have had our art to help us navigate our own processes with grief. I still find myself fluctuating back and forth. Such is the language of The Presence of Absence. In the end, I was able to find the missing vocabulary I was looking for, but I still think that gonness should be a word.
Memory, from The Presence of Absence
Passion, from The Presence of Absence
Morning, from The Presence of Absence
Luminance, from The Presence of Absence
Candescence, from The Presence of Absence
Accord, from The Presence of Absence
MK: What do you feel is the best way for you to grow as an artist? Are there any fears behind treading new waters?
JH: I grew up knowing that I was not like other people. In school, I found others like me just for safety, and through those friendships, the seeds of being an artist were sewn. The best way for me to grow as an artist is to expand my community. Working with other artists who share my mindset validates my practice as an artist. It’s like a healthy garden that needs constant cultivation. I love my creative community. I reach out locally and show up in person. It’s work that I enjoy. I support my friends who are artists at their art walks or gallery openings. If there are galleries that I like, I show up there. I show up to workshops and portfolio reviews. The art world is tiny. It’s amazing how many people you’ve admired become your friends or associates as you move through life.
I show up online as well. I enjoy online classes and the cohort of artists that you get to meet across the nation that would otherwise be impossible. I belong to many photo organizations now. This also expands my community. I do my best to maintain an updated website along with a well-curated Instagram account that is just about my practice. I connect the Instagram account to posts by my Facebook family and friends. This helps me stay in touch with artists on both platforms. I’m still experimenting with Threads and BlueSky. I want to have a presence, but I also want to be present for my cohort of artists.
It’s always a struggle to find the time to create new work while improving my own practices as an artist, like websites, social media, print logs, invoices, certificates of authenticity, inventory lists of availability, and all its details. But, the most important practice that contributed to my growth as an artist has been learning how to write about my own work and to workshop my writing with other artists who are much better at it than I am. It gives me permission to open up and learn more about my relationship with photography.
My fears about treading on new waters are mediated by my excitement to explore new waters.
Fear and excitement can feel the same. I often get them confused. I’d rather land on the side of excitement. I’ll always have fears that I won’t hit a deadline or the logistics of showing up.
I’m far more excited to share what happened while I was at play. Making time to play, or coming up with a plan to allow the play to happen spontaneously during a project, can get me through a lot of work. And, then that gives me permission to play with my artistic community (my playground).
MK: Was there a specific point in time when you felt that you had found your voice in photography and became satisfied with the direction of your work? Do you ever truly find yourself in a good place with your images, or are you always searching for more?
JH: I struggled with my creative work when it was photographically precise. I was controlling everything and getting nowhere. In 1985, I was involved with a very precise color project that took me months to make one image. One night I took the same equipment, film and filters into my backyard, and composed a tableau with a 4x5 camera. I opened the shutter and stepped into the scene with a flashlight, marking light across a small statue and cactus while switching out red, green, and blue filters. I didn’t stop until it was done. It was so imprecise, so expressive,e and so perfect. This was the start of the Cul-de-sac portfolio. This was where I found my voice and direction in photography and yet it seemed so anti-photographic and easy. I was young and wanted to burn photography down and let it start all over again. As a side note, digital photography would do that fifteen years later.
Where I am now is a truly good place with my work, but I’m always searching for more. I work on long-term projects. The Presence of Absence took 12 years to photograph and process into a printable portfolio. Los Angeles was done in 15 years, and now, 30 years later, I’m working on Los Angeles(revisited). And there’s another project I’ve been photographing for the last 30 years. There’s always room for more. Hopefully, more than I’ll be able to complete in my life. By the time this is published, I’ll be seventy. I finally feel like I have lived long enough with my art to finally understand it, and now I’m just ready to share.
Jerry #34, from Los Angeles (revisited)
John #93, from Los Angeles (revisited)
Lynn #41, from Los Angeles (revisited)
Naida #97, from Los Angeles (revisited)
RH #42, from Los Angeles (revisited)
MK: I think you might just be one of our communities’ greatest collaborators. You are always seen as very engaged with everyone, not just as an artist but also as a business owner, running a lab turned printing house. What are your feelings towards collaboration, and do you feel that there have been any from your past that have been the most significant to you?
JH: I love being part of this creative community. I enjoy printing with other artists, but my life is short, so I’m now using my time to finish my own projects. I retired from the family business in 2019. I only work with a few artists now.
I loved working with the Art Brewer, Tom Servais, and the rest of the surf photographer community.
I cherished working on The Great Picture with the legacy photographers Jerry Burchfield, Mark Chamberlain, Ron Johnson, Doug McCulloh, Clayton Spada, and Jacques Garnier.
I was honored when Jonathan Green, director of the California Museum of Photography, gave me the chance to print from the Ansel Adams negatives in their collection.
I treasured printing for my mentor, John Upton. Every meeting with him was full of stories about his teachers, Minor White, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston. Through him, I was able to meet Robert Hienecken, Robert Cumming, and Lewis Baltz.
Aline Smithson and her gang of merry makers showed me what it means to expand your artistic community and how to understand your own work and practices better.
And lastly my recent work with Naida Osline. She’s a great artist, a good friend, and she gives me incredibly long timelines to work on her files for printing.
MK: As if being an artist and business owner in this community isn’t enough, you also travel down the art world road as an educator. Has teaching always been on your radar to further your goals? What is it you get out of it?
JH: I’ve had unbelievably good luck with teaching. I was encouraged to teach by my friend and mentor John Upton, but it was Rick Steadry, the department’s chair, who asked me to stay as an an instructor. I’m happy to have been part of the School of Photography at Orange Coast College for the last 30 years. This spring semester, 2025, will be my last. I also taught at Santa Monica College concurrently for 4 years. I love teaching, but I’m done with grading. Teaching also gave me the opportunity to serve as the director of the Orange Coast College photography gallery. That is where I met you and Aline Smithson. Showing 10 artists a year was a huge challenge for me until I was able to plug into Aline’s network of lens-based artists. It was an education for me to learn how to build value into a gallery space and extend the art experience into the community. As an artist, I now try to bring those same skills to galleries and art spaces that show my work. Teaching photography, printing, and exhibiting work in an art institution was a gift to me. It had extended my artistic community farther than I could ever imagine back in 1987 when I first started exhibiting my work.
MK: In speaking to future generations of photographers, do you have any words of wisdom for those setting out to make their mark in the photographic world?
JH: Know your work and your audience; this will allow you to know yourself. The first step is to learn to write about what makes your work authentic. I know a lot of photographers are in photography because they felt they couldn’t write or draw. To build value in your work, you need to be ready to articulate your ideas and discuss what motivates you to photograph. And don’t be afraid to take an online class or workshop. I always recommend, Writing for Photography, it’s a class with Elin Spring and Suzanne Révy. I’ve taken their online class through the Griffin Museum of Photography and the Los Angeles Center for Photography.
You should always be building or expanding your creative community locally and be open to allowing your artistic community to grow into other areas of the country. Photographic organizations and Zoom can help you accomplish this. Photography organizations such as the Los Angeles Center for Photography, The Griffin Museum of Photography, the Houston Center for Photography, and the Southeast Center for Photography are good examples of organizations that offer classes, workshops, and calls for exhibitions. Take a class on how to present your work online and in person. All of these are ways to extend your community. This is the best way to understand your audience, get exposure, and get help with your work.
Be prepared enough to present your work within a few days. Portfolio presentations are more important these days. Whether it’s online or in person. When you present your work, the writing that you have done will give you a way of being present and in the moment. It allows you to be conversational during your presentation while you’re flipping through your images. These meetings also motivate you to keep your social media and websites up to date. The practice of being an artist is just as important as the practice of making your art.
MK: Thank you so much for your time here, John. One final question: How do you see your work progressing in the future? Do you have anything new you are currently working on that we should be on the lookout for?
JH: I’ve always been interested in the photograph’s distortion of time. Especially when recording a performance with light in front of the camera. When we look at a photograph, there’s an expected time distortion of just a fraction of a second. I’m always challenging the viewer’s expectations when they’re looking at a photograph that was created with an hour-long exposure.
Lately, I’m interested in saccadic eye movements and its role in the formation of our memory. A saccade is one of the fastest movements produced by the human eye. When we look, our eyes are jerking around the scene to create what we see. The brain assembles these saccades into an image we recognize. The eye does not act like a camera taking in the scene with one click of the camera’s shutter. I have a project that has been using the camera to scan a sequence of photographs to mimic the saccadic movement of the eye. I’ve been shooting this way in New Orleans during Mardi Gras season since 1991. Another long-term project.
I wander the streets during the season, scanning street scenes with the camera and capturing street portraits of the revelers 6-24 individual photographs at a time. The images are brought back home and composed into one very large photographic composite. Back when I was working on this project with film in the nineties, the camera movements were reproduced as grids. Since about 2018, they have become more amorphous. I now merge or stitch together multiple images where I can to start the process and then tile back in individual images that make sense to the final composite.
In viewing these works, the brain scrambles to reassemble the fragmented composite, much like the brain assembles the images from the saccadic movements of the eye. Because the camera can’t move as fast as the eye moves. I lean into my camera’s slowness. When I’m photographing an entire sequence, it might take from 2 minutes to 20 minutes. As I sequence with the camera, I wait for the right moment that makes sense with the rest of the anticipated moments. As the sequence assembles itself in my mind’s eye, I might reshoot or ask my subjects to play differently to the camera. My camera style is somewhere between collaborative and confrontational. I’m constantly participating and interacting with my subjects.
The working title has been New Orleans, but I don’t think it’s about Mardi Gras or the city. A new title and new writing for this project are on their way. There are plenty of great photographers who are better at capturing the city’s heritage and cultural legacy. I’m an outsider interested in the story of the outsider. It includes the outsiders trying on their new persona while visiting for the season and also the locals who see themselves as outsiders in their revelry. I’ve been photographing this for a long time, and I hope I have enough time to share all of it. It seems to take a couple of years to process and compose a season’s worth of work.
Thank you, Michael, for the opportunity to share my thoughts.
You can find more of John’s work on his website here.
All photographs, ©John Hesketh
