Words: Claire Spencer
As influenced by film as he is by photography, 24-year-old Hal has made an art out of his obsession, using still images to put a cinematic spin on the everyday world.
“I’m not sure obsession is a technique, but if it is, that’s how I’d define my process,” reflects Hal Sear. “I get wrapped up in the photographs, trying to re-stage a sensation over and over. Making the images is like day-dreaming; I go through the motions but my mind is somewhere else.” Hal’s photos tend to focus on domestic interiors, but with a theatrical edge that moves them out of the ordinary.
Hal won the South Square Trust Award earlier this year, and can now add the 4Talent Award for Photography to the tally. But it’s more than just an accolade to the young photographer.
“I’m just starting to develop a new project, so it means a lot that to me that the work I completed earlier in the year has been recognised,” explains Hal. “It’s important to me that a new audience gets to see my work.” His old audience was connected with his work at the Royal College of Art, where he’s just completed an MA. At the time, he feared that the course would limit his individuality as an artist, but as it happens, it embraced those qualities.
This is just as well, as Hal’s influences range beyond the confines of other photographers. “Film is a strong influence: screen beauty, or the screen enigma, interests me,” he expands. “Also contemporary French directors like Christophe Honore and Francois Ozon, and independent American film-makers such as Gus Van Sant and Gregg Araki.”
There is a certain disjointed narrative in his work: ‘Two Shadows’, for example, sees a strange juxtaposition between light and shade, memory and reality, warm and cold. Hal agrees: “I think my images are more like broken stories. Every picture is seductive, suggesting more than it reveals.”
Part of that storytelling process if reflected in the colour palette he uses; a faded brightness associated with dreams and memories. Hal acknowledges that he’s particularly interested in themes such as longing, and chooses the colours to intensify the audience’s reaction.
“The camera always lies,” he declares. “There’s a strong personal element to what I do, but it’s ultimately lost in the pictures. They are fantasy.” Arguably, our fantasies do as much to define our reality as the world around us, another theme integral to his work and illustrated with a recurrent isolated figure.
“He’s so different from me, yet at the same time familiar,” says Hal. “Within the image this kind of ‘dual’ persona is created, similar to a self-portrait, but with a barrier between us.” Finding the artist in the art can be difficult, and Hal claims that this has been important to viewers of his work to-date. “But then,” he concludes, “autobiography is the biggest fiction of all.”
