Artist in Residence: Photographer Sam Hiser

Photographer Sam Hiser works in medium and large format film as much as possible and specializes in architecture, landscape, fine art reproduction and sport. He is a specialist in traditional darkroom photographic printing, which he teaches to high school students at throughout the year in a class called Holga Heaven.

Hiser lives with his family in West Tisbury. In addition to being a photographer, he is also a web designer and a web project manager. He contributes to The Economist and The Financial Times on open source software and green IT.

Hiser is also independently studying copper plate photogravure under the tutelage of Paul Taylor at Renaissance Press.

We caught up with Hiser during the week his photography students’ show goes up at Featherstone on Sunday, March 11^th.

How long have you lived on Martha’s Vineyard?

Since 2007 ... five years. 

How did you arrive here?

"America" was going to seed and we wanted a kind of Tom-Sawyer / swinging-screen-door experience for the Bean, who was nine at the time. Enid always wanted a horse.  Green Acres meets Mr Ed.

Why do you stay?

The eggs at The Grey Barn, the yogurt at Mermaid Farm and the honey from that stand down Middle Road.  It's Watership Down, innit? 

How long have you taught at Featherstone?

A year and a half.

What’s your favorite thing about teenagers?

Their thirst for experience.  As photographers, their work is unconscious and uncontrived; they are my principal inspiration.

What has been the most awkward moment you’ve ever had as a teacher?

In a workshop, explaining aperture & shutter speed to someone who later introduced himself.  It was a name I immediately recognized from the list of Magnum photographers. 

Do you always shoot with film or do you also use a digital camera?

My trade is film and the hand-made print but ironically the camera I cannot do without is my iPhone.  This I use, a bit like Polaroid, for proofing composition on location and grabbing shots of my daughter when she is busting my chops.

Digital is important and valuable and capable of producing fine art, though the only areas it has revolutionized in the lens-based world are snapshots & photojournalism.

What is your favorite camera?

Anything from the Led Zeppelin era with a match-needle exposure meter fits me like a glove.  

The Holga is very important to me.  It's so cheap and sorry that using it to photograph is so pathetic that all the anxiety evaporates ... on both sides of the camera.  It's the only camera that can capture insouciant candids of other photographers.

On any given day, it's my Pentax 6x7, my Sinar Norma or my Graflex Crown Graphic.

What, where or who is your favorite Island subject to shoot?

The Vineyard's vernacular architecture carries forward the DNA of a practical, circumspect, hard-working, superstitious and faithful people. The shingles everywhere are adapted from the skin of the sea-creatures and the white cantons on the corners and top-decorated pillars would make Vitruvius smile. In the symmetries I feel the hope for comfort from unpredictable weather. It's all there -- aspiration, optimism and suffering. "Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked," writes Seamus Heaney, of a poem that utters of a mythic old hall.

What is the best thing about being an artist on the Island?

Having humbling company. An expressive culture is so very nourishing.

Where is your favorite place to get dinner in the off-season?

State Road Restaurant routinely fills us with well-being.

What is your favorite family activity in the summer?

Swimming at grandma and gampa's in Vermont.

What have you been working on this winter?

A series on architecture and a sequence of trees, for publication.

There's been a minor construction project -- a darkroom, bellow-stairs -- to which I add a little bit each month like a bird gathering pieces for the nest.  I fear any day now, Vern Laux is going to report a siting: me legging it with Alison Shaw's old enlarger out the back of The Gazette.   

Guilty pleasures?

Speeding (in a car). Good coffee. Marzipan. Not necessarily in that order.

Post-war Japanese vernacular photography -- Araki (Nobuyoshi), Moriyama (Daido) & Takanashi (Yutaka), for example. 

Holga Heaven - Photography Students of Sam Hiser. Opening Reception Sunday, March 11^th 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm. Virginia Weston Besse Gallery, Featherstone, Oak Bluffs. Continues through March 16 12:00 – 4:00 pm daily http://www.featherstoneart.org/