For years I have been actively documenting my life and the lives of those around me, recording events and attempting to create order in a sometimes chaotic world. While my photographs focus on the personal, the familiar and the simply ordinary, the work strikes a balance between autobiography and fiction. Within the photographs physical distance is often manipulated to represent emotional distance. The casual glances people share can take on a deeper significance, and what initially appears subjective and intimate is quite often a commentary on the larger contours of life.

For me, the construction of panoramic photographs, comprised of various single images, acts as a visual language. Focal planes shift, panel by panel. This sequencing of photographs and shifting of focal planes allows me the luxury of guiding the viewer across the photograph, directing their eye; an effect which could not be achieved through a single image.

I continually aspire to represent the spaces we inhabit, relationships we create, and the objects with which we surround ourselves. I hope the messages the photographs deliver speak to the personal as well as the universal experience. I find the enduring power and the sheer ability of a photograph to express a thought, a moment, or an idea, to be the most powerful expression of myself, both as an artist, and as an individual.

– David Hilliard

Workshops

Motives, Modes & Motifs
Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA
August 2 to August 7, 2026

Group Exhibitions

Framing Nature: Gardens and Imagination
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
March 15 to June 28, 2026

Kaleidoscope: 100 Years of Collecting for Our Community
Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, MA
February 21, 2026 to May 2, 2027

Manifest and Sublime
Yancey Richardson, New York, NY
July 8 to August 7, 2026

Ongoing Group Project

Charles River Composition: 48 Photographers - 308 Square Miles - 1 River - 1 Year

Publications

The Haunted: Contemporary Photography Conjured in New Englandis a limited edition book of photography and poetry by SPEEDWELL

Gardens and Imagination: Framing Nature in Art
MFA Boston
Forthcoming Exhibition Book