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| Despite postmodernist notions that there is no truth, for more than a decade I have chosen to make photographs that tell the truth. These are images from my travels, images of real people in an increasingly hyper-realistic world, a world filled with joy, beauty, tragedy. Our postmodern condition is supposedly new and improved because of technology. But technology has enabled us to kill over 160 million human beings in one century in one war after another. We understand less and less about each other. Our perception can no longer be trusted. We often, mistakenly, base reality in an all too subjective and often controlled media. We gain our empirical reality through experience. Experience remains our best teacher. Such experience is our truth, our only phenomenological truth. But this is nothing new. Over 2,000 years ago Plato wrote about the shadows on the wall. I always carry a camera with me. When I see something that moves me I make an image to represent the experience. This is the only way I know to share my truth. I saw the poor children in Nicaraguan villages where IMF money is never seen. I saw Mongolian wrestlers visualizing victory in a bankrupt country. I wandered Belarus, part of the former Soviet Union, where people who, not many years ago, were considered America's enemies, are trying to live their lives in peace. I sat with my nearly blind grandfather, listening and watching, as CNN tried to figure out who won the 2000 election. I saw angry kids making their own music in a backyard outside the mainstream on the edge of Los Angeles. I saw Coke ads in a Tibetan Exile Monastery in southern India where few Westerners are allowed. In my short life I have seen so many things that I will never see again. Globalization, technology and the availability of cheap airline tickets make it possible to do so. But I have scarce time to show you even a brief moment of my experience. With my camera I capture fragments of time and space. These images add up to only a few seconds but these few seconds these images have the power to change perception. A terribly beautiful world exists outside the psychological walls of our controlled media. There is no Hollywood ending. Whether or not you want to believe what I am showing you with my documentary images is your choice. Believe what you must. We all choose what we want to believe. Regardless of your beliefs, I hope you will open your epistemological curtains and, at least momentarily, entertain my photographs. Thank You. Sincerely, Jeremy Hogan |
| Jeremy Hogan |
| ABOUT THE ARTIST-- |
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| -- "the world is diverse, unpredicatable and not easily understood even if someone does have an expensive education." |
| Fragments of reality |
| Documentary photographs as personal truth |
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| ARTIST'S STATEMENT-- |
(b 1972) Jeremy Hogan grew up mostly in California’s Central Valley where he began photographing skateboarders at age 14 in Porterville, California. At age 15 he talked his way into a part-time job for the local newspaper and not long after this he began a serious practice in fine-art photography directed by his high school art teacher who had directed a series of award winning short films. He is the grandson of sharecroppers, “like those who were depicted by Walker Evans and James Agee”; both his grandfathers rode trains as hobos. |
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| by Jeremy Hogan |
In 1969 Hogan’s father dropped out of high school and went to Vietnam. He came home disillusioned with America. He was unable to find steady employment in California where many Vietnam Veterans had not been welcomed home. During Hogan’s childhood in the 70s, with little financial stability, his family inhabited various examples of suburbia. This experience was far from the American Dream promised by textbooks in the public schools he attended. He is a 1997 graduate of San Jose State University where he studied Photography, Journalism and Art History. Hogan has worked as a staff photographer at the Modesto Bee, the Indianapolis News, the Kansas City Star, the Palm Beach Post, the Ann Arbor News, and most recently the Bloomington Herald Times. Hogan’s photography has appeared in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, America 24/7, In These Times, The Progressive, Planet, Indiana Review and magazines throughout Europe. A creative non-fiction short story about meeting his hobo grandpa will be featured in an upcoming issue of Honey du – a journal of Southern literature. His photographs will be featured in an upcoming issue of the Indiana Review titled writing between cultures. In 1998 he won the Hoosier State Press Association Photo of the Year and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Spot News photography Since 1998, Hogan has self-funded documentary photography projects that have taken him to Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Belarus, Japan, India, Mongolia and Turkey. Hogan’s projects include images of Tibetan Exiles in India, Post-Soviet Mongolians, Post-Soviet Belarus, Mexican-Americans as well as images from the early 90s of his teen friends and classmates who were the first generation to be raised on MTV. *More of Jeremy's work can be seen at: www.jeremyhogan.com |