A Fly In The Middle
“I couldn’t understand why they were shooting at me and this other photographer.” Being caught between the police and protesters is something Jodi Hilton grew accustomed to when covering demonstrations in Turkey. But being specifically targeted with rubber-bullets that carried irritant powder, while staying hunched down in a door-entry, was new to her. At some point the two photographers sprinted out of there in a zig-zag run. When removing her gear, Hilton realized that she had been hit. “I stopped going to those kind of protests after that.” She found out a few weeks later that the other photographer belonged to a leftist group — and the police knew who he was.
Jodi Hilton sits in the barely decorated office she shares with another professor. A few mandarins and some apple bread, which she politely offers, are lying on the desk in front of her. In moments like this her experiences seem far away. The 49-year-old has shed light on the dire and untold fate of countless people through her photographs. She portrayed the Kalash-people, Pakistan’s smallest minority. She went to Turkish refugee camps to photograph the last tattooed women of Kobane. And she documented the gruesome trek of refugees on the infamous Balkan-route, among many other things. “I’ve been to most of the continents except Africa and Australia,” she says. Now, Hilton finishes her first semester as a professor at AUBG.
Itis an unlikely career for somebody growing up in an idyllic and upscale place like Concord, Massachusetts. But Hilton’s curiosity was piqued early by the travels her parents took her and her brother on. “So, on the one hand I was raised in this very perfect little place. But I grew up in an atmosphere where we were encouraged to go out into the world.” For her Bat Mitzwah, Hilton received her first camera. “It was an Olympus, the one with the little window that opened. It takes 35mm film, but it was a simple camera.” She attributes her interest in photography to her family, that, over different generations, shared a passion for art. ”Then I had these two parallel interests: art and photography — which are really the same, in a way,” Hilton says.
Her interest in people and their stories developed in college, where she would do street photography. As an undergraduate, she did a project along the US-Mexican border which she deems her “formative migration story. I find borders very interesting, I’m also interested in this grey area — where do things actually change?” But that interest isn’t constrained to the frontier between two countries. In Bucharest, for example, Hilton portrayed the border between the over- and the underworld — literally. She took pictures of drug addicts while her colleague, Mitra Nazar, interviewed them. Many of them were kids living underground in the vicinity of old heat pipes. “At some point it became clear that I was invited to go underground, which involved climbing into a narrow hole in the ground,” Hilton says. She refused the offer; in the end she still went with another group of kids she trusted. “They were paint addicted, not heroin addicted, which for me is a big difference.”
Hilton and Nazar first met in 2013, when both reported on the first groups of refugees who were stranded in tent-cities in Bulgaria. They subsequently covered stories in Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Kosovo together as a team. Nazar is impressed with Hilton’s work: “I think Jodi is one of the best photographers out there.” Though she points out that it is not only the skills that make her a good photojournalist, but also the way she treats people. The fact that she not only cares about the photos, but also about the stories behind them. “Like this Roma family she met in Serbia, time and again she’d go back, keep in touch with them, they had a small baby and were undocumented. Jodi helped them as much as she could. She wanted to do something for them, as she got to care for them. This, for me, is Jodi.”
Hilton has lived abroad for almost ten years now. At first, she went to Istanbul, then, in 2014, she moved to Sofia. She has been a freelancer for most of her career. The haunted, the marginalized, and the outcasts have been the focus of much of her work. Many of Hilton’s photographs transport a frail intimacy and trust between the subject and the lenses. “For me that is the only way to take pictures. Have you heard of the phrase ‘fly on the wall’? I actually have taken the opposite approach: I think that the only way I can work is to get to know people and to open up myself,” she says about her process. Gaining people’s trust comes easily to her. What helps is sharing a common ground through her experience with different cultures. And people often are happy to have somebody to talk to — especially those going through traumatic experiences. “You become a vessel for all their pain,” Hilton says.
Now she must deal with a new kind of pain: students fighting with deadlines and struggling with projects. Freelancing can be a tenuous existence. “You never really know where your next paycheck is coming from,” Hilton says. So, when she received an offer to teach at AUBG it seemed like a natural next step to take. She has meddled with teaching at summer schools, but this is her first full tenure. Her first semester was tough, as students were testing her and trying to figure out who she was — as did she. And she is still in the process of finding out. “But I like that experience of teaching. It’s fun to inspire young people, but it’s also a way of reflecting on your own working experience,” Hilton says.
Hilton has taken thousands of photographs and now teaches young people about her profession. When it comes to the question what makes a good photo, she shares a simple mantra her editor and mentor at her first internship told her: “What is it? It is it,” she says with a grin. After a small pause she explains: “There is a spoken language and there is a visual language. The reason for a visual language is, that there are things you can’t explain with words. And the reason why it’s hard to define what makes a good picture is because — a good picture explains itself. If you’re taking a portrait, there are two kinds: One that shows what the person looks like. And the other one explaining who the person is. And that is what we as photographers are aiming for.”
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Sebastian Panny studies Journalism and Mass Communication and is an exchange student at AUBG. He would have very much liked to fit more of the exciting stories he was told in this profile.
