Chosen Family: David Hilliard

David Hilliard has been photographing his life on the East Coast and elsewhere for over twenty years. Through cinematic, multi-image panoramas he is often noted for his nuanced photographic storytelling. His unique method combines both the still, singular moment with the movement and perspective only achievable through the passage of time. These decades of work also reveal his own shifting constructions of home, masculinity, desire, and family. Chosen Family brings together works made between 1993 and 2018 to explore these various positionings within three worlds: his liberal father’s gritty New England life, his conservative mother’s evangelical world in southwest Florida, and the queer families he has created throughout the country, but primarily in his own homes in Massachusetts and Maine.

How do we maintain the ties that bind a “traditional” family when it has chosen to separate? Can this search for connection at times fall short? And, how might we situate ourselves more comfortably within our own constructions of family? Hilliard’s expert weaving of moments and movements in time remind us that the story is fully ours to tell – it all depends on where we place ourselves and how we choose to frame our view.