In production and scheduled for release in mid-2026, Then Was Now is a boundary-scrambling work that explores new territory in the photo / text tradition. It unfolds on different levels and fuses several distinct strands: a visual document of a previous time, a personal narrative, and a vehicle for playful musings on culture, time, change, life, loss, and on how photographs serve as visual memories and representations of the past.
In Then Was Now Hans Hickerson explores Portland, Oregon in the early 1980s. His photographs document particulars of the time, including physical appearances and social behavior. People – students and businessmen, kids and commuters, seniors and teens, parents and protestors, shoppers and police, office workers and artists – are observed in a variety of situations and settings. Embedded in the photographs is an awareness of social class, status, gender, and power as well as of the subject’s relationship to the photographer. We see people from a multiplicity of backgrounds and abilities – physical, cultural, ethnic, political, and professional – collected into a mosaic of society.
Layers of texts function as narrative, background information, labels, asides, quotes, coy hidden clues, and commentary. Their graphic form complements and interacts with the photographs and plays with the tension between blank two-dimensional space and the pictorial illusion that we read as three dimensions. Although they are not always visible at first glance, some two thirds of the images include texts.
In production. Late spring / early summer 2026 anticipated release.
In production and scheduled for release in mid-2026, Then Was Now is a boundary-scrambling work that explores new territory in the photo / text tradition. It unfolds on different levels and fuses several distinct strands: a visual document of a previous time, a personal narrative, and a vehicle for playful musings on culture, time, change, life, loss, and on how photographs serve as visual memories and representations of the past.
In Then Was Now Hans Hickerson explores Portland, Oregon in the early 1980s. His photographs document particulars of the time, including physical appearances and social behavior. People – students and businessmen, kids and commuters, seniors and teens, parents and protestors, shoppers and police, office workers and artists – are observed in a variety of situations and settings. Embedded in the photographs is an awareness of social class, status, gender, and power as well as of the subject’s relationship to the photographer. We see people from a multiplicity of backgrounds and abilities – physical, cultural, ethnic, political, and professional – collected into a mosaic of society.
Layers of texts function as narrative, background information, labels, asides, quotes, coy hidden clues, and commentary. Their graphic form complements and interacts with the photographs and plays with the tension between blank two-dimensional space and the pictorial illusion that we read as three dimensions. Although they are not always visible at first glance, some two thirds of the images include texts.
In production. Late spring / early summer 2026 anticipated release.