Pleasure Faire, 1996
Composite image

Canyon Duo - No Dogs Series, 1975
From a series of skate boarders in southen California in the 70s

Chico Dormido - Series Camaras Ocultos, 1977
Shot in southern California.

La Camara - Series Camaras Ocultos, 2001
Composite image

A ThousandYears from Now - Series Suenos Playeros, 1972
Burroughs refered to tis image as "a hundred years from now."

Topo Chico - Camaras Ocltas Series, 1995
Image captured on the street in Mexico.

El Chico Flotante - Series Suenos Plaeros, ca 1988
Shot off a pier in Mexico

Los Chavos de la Cueva - Suenos Playeros Series, ca. 2000

La Mujer Dormida - Series Suenos Playeros, ca. 1997
Composite image

Hugh Holland’s Visions:
An Appreciation
by Ted Titolo

When first viewing a Holland print, one is struck by a deceptively seductive calm and gentleness, and the sense of direct communication from the heart; but there’s more; the peacefulness rides on the edge of terror. The terror is what we of the civilized world have buried deeply, but it’s always available for awakening by a true seer.

Working with his photo archive (his palette) of various locations, landscapes, buildings or rooms, and the images of young native laborers or those participating in religious rituals, their poses mostly unselfconscious activity or rest from work, he selects elements from various photographs, creates new landscapes, imagination spaces, stretching or shrinking elements to fit his new reality composed on a computer monitor. Then figures are added to inhabit his constructed reality, adjusted to naturalistic foreground or background size, carefully colored, and the lighting, the shadows, the moods of daylight or night are added. All are believable, yet exist only on a disk. When made tangible as an archival giclée print on heavy rough watercolor paper, they glow astoundingly. Real...disturbing...never merely surrealist, but unsolvable
symbolist works of great complexity....visions.

Even a simple straightforward nude figure, an agreeably beautiful subject, presents us with conflicts...we of an imperial civilization...for when we see such a person with an undivided self, gazing openly at us with an untroubled simplicity, we come to doubt our superiority. Confronted so, we are made hollow by natural truths, and suspect that perhaps the greatest thing we have to fear is civilization itself.

Holland’s work imaginatively leads us to self-inspection. What is the price of leaving even thorned paradises to become a mere digit, just one more package in the frozen food section of the world? He accomplishes this, not by attacking what we are, but by showing us an alternative. Make no mistake, these are not dreamy Edens, the stuff of commerce, but are places of the heart where death is real, but is balanced by the easy sensuality of life. Complex. Direct. Warm.

In many they are about the supernatural that is alive and present, although usually unseen in our censored minds. This is the stuff of true religion, captured as it is lived and practiced by the subjects interpreted in Holland’s prints. Death and sexuality are not outlaws, but part of the natural scheme.

His colors, all incredibly saturated, are mostly earth tones sometimes carefully balanced by a delicate violet area, or aura, a flash of white, and deep shadows. When an outdoor scene, the blue sky or green sea seem as gentle as the shades of sand. Ocean flows to shore and becomes a beach with a mysterious figure floating in the sand as if it were water. And then there is fire...raw, bright red. A religious procession at night. Youngsters carrying a large crucifix on which lies another youth. They proceed out of a bursting of flames, and from a side street, a second pilgrimage marches to join the first.

They are about sacrificed saints who are very much alive and alert, nearly smiling. About youths who learn the mysteries from their older brothers and workers; and about intimate friends who share a secret chamber...a shadowed room.

There are two images of a figure swimming in fire. Or is he made of fire? These are echoes of eternity that reveal the visionary. Are they human? Are they divine? They are beauty, and function as in native American (Passamaquoddy) understanding: “For we are the stars. For we sing. For we sing with our light. For we are birds made of fire. For we spread our wings over the sky. Our light is a voice. We cut a road for the soul for its journey through death.”
Holland’s visionary images seem to hold in them the uncensored natural, the supernatural, and terror. But the terror may be simply what we bring when we see what is ordinarily hidden...an unveiled view of what is.

Hugh Holland
Hugh left Oklahoma, where he was born raised and educated (liberal arts, theatre, theology), for southern CA in 1966 in his ‘60s Chevy California Dreaming on the radio. A self taught photographer he began photographing what he saw around him and loved. Travel in Spain as a vagabond in 1968 was instrumental in changing his life, developing a fascination for the colors and flavors of Spanish life; and he began incorporating such things as Catholic iconography, colonial ruins, and pensive, romantic figures in his pictures. Back in CA from 1969 til 1986 he work as furniture refinisher doing gold leafing and faux finishes but always photographing as his first love. He lived and traveled in Mexico for the next 10 years. During this period he began his digital collages. After sojourns in Oklahoma, Boston and Oregon he settled in San Francisco in 2001.He has exhibited at LLGAF in And Lo! The Old Gods! and The Kiss. Beginning last year, enlargements of his skate boarder No Dogs Series are being used by American Apparel to decorate their stores internationally and he just finished his first ever men’s fashion shoot for the enterprise. A book is being planned of the No Dogs Series. His work is available through Leslie/Lohman Gallery and ArtSeal Gallery SF.

In the late 70s he met William Burroughs, who enthralled by Hugh’s photographs, proposed an unfortunately never published collaboration. Burroughs wrote these uncharacteristically brief words to accompany A Thousand Years from Now.

Click...
boy squats on a ruined car
a hundred years from now
phantom smell
of ozone and rectal mucous
cracked pavements
weeds growing through...
dead nitrous streets of an old filmset...
Darkness falls on ruined suburbs
fading streets a distant sky.

—William Burroughs