Rangefinder Magazine
January 2005

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Profile: Pamela Ellis Hawkes by P.J. Heller
Fine Art Photography Goes From Dining Room to Board Room

“Still Life With Silver Bowl” after Peale, 2001

“I started doing still lifes in the dining room because I could do it while the kids were playing or napping,” Pamela Ellis Hawkes recalls. “I didn’t have to leave the house. I could sneak off and work.” From those simple beginnings, Hawkes has managed not only to raise a family but also to nurture a growing career as a fine art photographer.

Although she still works out of her Rockport, MA, home, Hawkes has since moved from shooting in the dining room to photographing in a studio on the third floor of the house. Her two children have grown up watching their mother working behind a 4x5 view camera.

At one point, when her family spent a year and a half in California, she worked with pinhole camera. She did some portraits of her children using the camera handheld with exposures anywhere from five to 10 minutes.

	“Daisy,” 2000

“They’d have to sit still,” she says, then adds with a laugh, “They’re just grateful I’m no longer using a pinhole camera.”

Hawkes has had four one-person shows at the Pepper Gallery in Boston, which handles most of her work, as well as one in the Fall of 2001 at the Houston Center for Photography in Texas.

Hawkes’ work is featured in both public and private collections including: the Houston Museum of Fine Art, the Polaroid Collection, the Boston Public Library, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Addison Gallery of American Art and Fidelity Investments of Boston.

She admits her technique has come a long way from her days after high school in Andover, MA, where she worked in a camera store.

	Precious Thing,” 2000

“I decided I wanted to be a photographer even though I didn’t know the first thing about it,” she says.

Working in the darkroom at the camera store, she says she “learned to print very badly.” She also took passport and portrait photos and quickly realized it wasn’t the type of photography she wanted to do.

From there, she went to work for a printing company doing graphic design, paste-ups and related work while delegating photography to a hobby. It wasn’t until she quit work to have a family that she started getting serious again about photography.

Several workshops—including a weeklong session on printing—at the Maine Photographic Workshops helped her hone her skills.

“Garzoni Fruit,” 2001

Hawkes describes her work as “still life constructions.”

“I construct the still lifes,” she explains. “They’re not found still lifes. I try to use objects that can be ambiguous. I use mostly paper objects; it doesn’t have to be only subject in the picture, but generally there is some kind of surrogate object in the photograph.

“My ideas about my own photography have to do with the automatic authority that a photograph has,” she says. “how people automatically assume it is a document of truth. Because photographers have to ‘possess reality’ they can’t conjure up images from their memory or imagination. I use ‘surrogate objects’ as an alternative to memory and imagination. So in my work I try to make pictures that make the viewer think and wonder about reality and what it is and how photography can take you out of reality and be inventive without being manipulative.”

	“Fruit Still Life” after Soreau, 2001

“When looking at photographs, we tend to believe what we see as revealing a certain truth,” Hawkes says. “Although this is becoming less true with the proliferation of computer-aided photography, for traditional ‘straight photographs’ this rule generally still applies.

“Because it is necessary to possess physical reality, photographers, as opposed to artists in other mediums, can’t conjure up images from memory or imagination. This concept has fascinated and confounded me since making my first photographs. These pictures were inspired by and explore the limits of that concept. For instance, in a photograph, is a photocopy of an object perceived as a surrogate for the ‘real’ object or is it perceived as the object itself? What is the difference between a photocopy of an object, the real object or a drawing of an object when photographed? Can they be an alternative to memory or imagination?

“These images are renderings of questions about the nature of pictures, and how photographs, through reality, representation and reproduction are perceived,” she says.

Hawkes’ images seem to be suspended, due in part to her use of a dark background.

“Double Cardinal,” 2000	“Paper Tulips,” 2001

“I mostly use a black background so everything kind of floats, so there’s no sense of space,” she explains. “On most of them I try to keep the scale ambiguous or mysterious so you’re not quite sure what the scale is.”

Hawkes relies on a Zone VI field camera for her work and a Schneider 210mm lens. She shoots Polaroid Type 55 film in order to immediately have a negative, then prints from those negatives in her darkroom.

“Garzoni Fruit with Apple,” 2001

The Pepper Gallery (www.peppergalleryboston.com) sells Hawkes’ prints. Hawkes is upbeat about the future of the art market for photography.

She reports galleries in Boston are selling more and more photography, and there is an increasing number of photo shows and exhibitions in the area.

“I certainly wouldn’t go into fine art photography thinking of making money,” she says. “That’s true in any art. You do it because it’s what you love to do.”

P.J. Heller operates Dateline, a freelance photojournalism service based in Santa Barbara, Calif. He can be reached via email at pjheller@west.net/.