“Wrestling with issues of memory, place and identity, I see my life as a narrative and my photography as its expression. My art gives visual voice to my personal and collective memories. It is inside ordinary moments where I find windows into larger meaning. Light, perspective, and points in time are the pivotal elements I use to reveal an interior presence within my subjects as I search for what I identify as the Signature of the Spirit.”
HM: Let’s start at the beginning. Where did you grow up and how did photography find you?
CH: I grew up in a small village in southeast Alabama about eight hundred people. My mother was a schoolteacher, my father a businessman. Summers meant working in cotton and peanut fields. My high school class had twelve people.
I went on to Tuskegee. My mother insisted on it she wanted me to attend a school founded by a Black man, Booker T. Washington. I studied business and sociology. Sociology changed how I saw the world how individual lives connect to larger forces.
Photography came by accident. I was the business manager of the student newspaper and had to hire a photographer. One day he hadn’t done the work, so I went to his house and waited while he processed the film. While I was there, I saw photographs on his wall of Depression-era farmers. Poor, but dignified.
They reminded me of my great-aunts and uncles back home. And I thought: what would happen if I photographed them and put those pictures on their walls? Would they feel worthy of being seen that way?
I didn’t have money to keep hiring a photographer, so I learned. After about a year and a half, I went home, made the pictures, framed them, and put them on their walls.
Then I watched their faces.
That was the moment. That’s how I started.
