My work is organized around sustained, uninterrupted attention. Rather than producing images or objects oriented toward rapid legibility, I construct material, temporal, and spatial conditions in which perception is permitted to unfold without instruction or urgency.

I work with light, water, paper, duration, and materially responsive processes, including 19th-century photographic technologies such as wet-plate collodion, alongside cameraless and handmade paper practices. These processes are engaged not for their historical referentiality, but for their insistence on slowness, contingency, and environmental responsiveness. Often the work commits to a single site, material, or constraint long enough for attention itself to become perceptible.

Across photography, collodion on glass, cameraless processes, handmade paper, installation, and participatory formats, I privilege material agency over authorial control. The work resists immediacy as both an aesthetic and a cultural demand, instead cultivating conditions for non-instrumental encounter, embodied presence, and subtle transformation. This approach is grounded in an ethic of permission rather than extraction, allowing bodies, materials, and viewers to remain autonomous within the work.

Whether experienced individually or collectively, the work does not require performance, interpretation, or resolution. It offers sustained conditions of encounter in which meaning emerges through duration and continued presence.

Biography

Hillary Irene Johnson holds two MFAs—Photography and Creative Writing—from Columbia College Chicago, where she also served as a Curatorial and Education Assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. She is currently a Teaching Scholar in Photography at the University of Notre Dame.

Her work has been supported by the Albert P. Weisman Award and the Thall-Mulvany Awards, and has been exhibited in the United States and internationally, including the 2nd Quanzhou International Image Biennale at the Fujian Huanguang Photography Art Museum, Hüten Gallery in Shanghai, Image Union, and Pasadena Photo Arts. Her projects have been featured in publications and outlets such as The Chicago Reader, National Public Radio, NBC News, A Photo Editor, and Frontrunner Magazine.

Johnson’s practice spans photography, 19th-century photographic processes, cameraless work, handmade paper, and installation, and is grounded in sustained attention to material, light, and duration. 

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