Sean Patrick Hill

Bio

​My photography is wide-ranging, though I have a love of landscape photography, whether it’s captured in nature or even the urban environment. I find my inspiration in the natural environment, or in just being outdoors. Photography allows me to slow down, to walk and consider what I am seeing, to look deeply at the world. I have found my photographs on the California coast, in the deserts of Death Valley and Capitol Reef, and in the mountains of Kentucky.
 
My work is done entirely on film, both color and black-and-white, and is achieved using a large-format camera (specifically, a 4x5 field camera) and medium format (a 6x7 single lens reflex), though I am not adverse to touring around with one of my 35mm cameras. Film renders reality with precision and in a classic style that, to me, is unrivalled.
 
I prefer the larger format films because they are capable of incredible detail, and this is what makes printing so satisfying. My color printing relies on more modern means—and that means archival pigment prints, otherwise called inkjet. But my black-and-white prints are made entirely in the traditional format of gelatin silver prints, created in the darkroom.
 
In both cases, my photographs are entirely handmade. From loading film to carrying cameras into the wilderness, from exposure to development, and from printing to mounting and, ultimately, framing, I love the handiwork of each individual photograph. My finished pieces are presented as photographers have done since the early twentieth century--especially many of my heroes, Brett Weston, Minor White, or Eliot Porter, to name a few—and signed in graphite. Each photograph uses archival materials and is made to last for hundreds of years.