“AFTER THAT, I WAS HOOKED BY THE ROMANCE OF IT ALL, OF OLD HOLLYWOOD, OF JOHN WAYNE AND JOHN HUSTON FILMS”.
- Jane Hilton
Having made the decision to make her way into photography instead of music in the early nineties, Jane was first seduced by the sweeping 180-degree vistas, the light offered by the Arizona desert. Her love affair with the limitless opportunities and enduring myth of the open road was ignited on her first magazine shoot, when she travelled to Arizona, with six male models in tow, to work as a photography assistant on a ten-day shoot.
After growing-up on spaghetti westerns, she couldn’t resist an adventure to Bisbee, a nearby mining town of a bygone America, complete with cowboy ranges and biker gangs riding along on Harley Davidsons. While there, she discovered a one-book bookstore, where she met an old cowboy wearing a Stetson and dungarees. In his 70s, with little interest from publishers, he had produced his own book, which he sold as a single title in his shop. “He told me his story and I ended-up photographing him”, says Jane by way of explanation. “After that, I was hooked by the romance of it all, of old Hollywood, of John Wayne and John Huston films”.
In 1992 she first visited Nevada on a job, shooting the desert landscape and she has continued to road trip her way across the country to this day. While the vast skies, endless highways and landscapes were the initial draw, it was the hidden or lesser-known worlds that beckoned. The bordellos where sexual exchanges are fulfilled, circus folk, cowboys and the places they called home are what brought her back again and again.
On Valentine’s Day in 1993, Jane was working on a commercial job staying at the Hacienda Hotel & Casino (now the Mandalay Bay). She leant out her window to see the excitement of a constant stream of white limos with brides and grooms arriving. It was an implausible sight, like a conveyor belt, and beyond her comprehension at the time. “This began an eight -year project to document the McDonald’s style wedding culture, and my own love affair with Las Vegas,” she says, “where the line between fantasy and reality is constantly blurred.”
Jane has explored the American west from many vantage points, as she sees it.
Her exhibition and book, Dead Eagle Trail, featured cowboys photographed in their home and living spaces. Surrounded by their talismanic visual narrative and artefacts that are so representative of their place within cowboy culture and indeed counterculture, the question begged, will there even be cowboys in 50 years?
The project was later followed-up in 2013 with Precious, a book and exhibition of working girls, shot in 11 of Nevada’s legal brothels. The subjects were photographed in the nude on a plate camera and stand as a visual tale of these working women which aimed to go deeper than the superficial nature of their trade. “I called the book Precious, because to me they are”, explains Jane. Also in 2013, she was awarded a fellowship by the Royal Photographic Society, joining David Bailey, Terence Donovan, Terry O’Neill, Nan Goldin and Tim Walker, among other internationally celebrated fellows.
“I CALLED THE BOOK PRECIOUS, BECAUSE TO ME THEY ARE”
- Jane Hilton
While the states of America always called to her, in 2019, it was the drag queens on the Vegas strip who made her hit the Nevada roads again. She was on an assignment in 2019 in New Mexico and afterwards detoured to Vegas. On the lookout for new communities for her book on Nevada, Hilton ended-up at a drag queen bingo event by accident. After experiencing the girls’ redefinition of the American dream one innuendo at a time, she was hooked again.
From that moment she was on a mission to photograph members of this community, which took, she says, some convincing. Some had been photographed but in glitzy clubs in colour, lit with a flash and retouched. So, they took some persuading to lure them out of their bars and clubs and onto the plains where John Huston shot ‘The Misfits’ (the film that inspired this series). It became a collaboration with the drag queens doing their own make-up and making their own outfits. Through these robust portraits, Jane further explores the mythology of the ‘American Cowboy’ – transforming it into one that is inclusive of all genders, sexualities, and races.
The current works, showing at New York’s Palo Gallery which runs until 6 April 2024 transpired after Hilton visited the LA Gun Club in downtown Los Angeles in 2016 at the suggestion of her assistant and was captivated by the experience. Each participant can select from over a hundred target posters that range from minimalist human forms to cartoon bad guys.
Hilton decided to return to the club a few months later, and make more of a conceptual project by interviewing the shooters, taking away the remains of their unique ’shot’ target posters, and re-photographing them. They were made by a cross section of the community from a brain surgeon to a couple on a “date night”. “I met a biology teacher and a school principal, who said they went there for stress relief,” she adds. “One guy slept in bed with his girlfriend and two guns, out of paranoia.”
In the 30 plus years that Jane has photographed America, a trip last year, marked one of her most poignant. She travelled from London to Nevada to photograph the funeral of her great cowboy friend, Johnny Green, after whom her son is named. Capturing his last ride, the “send-off” he would have wanted, the service took place in the “sale barn” he had visited every week for 60 years, to buy and sell his cattle, horses and sheep. His coffin moved onwards, flanked by 25 cowboys and cowgirls, who rode beside him to his final resting place at the cemetery, his riderless horse behind him, his cowboy boots dangling from the saddle.
Jane Hilton’s photo books and portraits have featured in many of the world’s publications, galleries and art fairs, with a visual odyssey that encompasses a modern folkloric Americana, joining the paths of artists Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore who famously captured the mid-West: the drifters, grifters, the coalminers, the waitresses, butchers and the outcasts, those who worked and lived the lives of the “unremarkable”, the civilians who were part of the everyday.
LA Gun Club will run at Palo Gallery, New York until 6 April www.palogallery.com / www.janehilton.com
