“Great Photographs … or, at least, some really good ones” with W. M. Hunt

New York City-based, W.M. “Bill” Hunt returns to North Carolina with a new talk based on a project written over the past eighteen months.  His keynote talk will be about about looking at photographs, and more specifically how he looks at them. This Click! event will present Hunt with a fresh opportunity to take off his mask and reveal himself.  He means to be fresh, entertaining, slightly rude, and (hopefully) insightful. Hunt has given talks all over the world, from Sao Paolo to Shanghai.  He reviews portfolios, judges competitions, and attends photography fairs and festivals—each serving as a way of trying to stay relevant.

Bill Hunt has been collecting, looking at, and talking about photography for more than forty years. Hunt says, “Photography changed his life; it gave him one.” He has created two collections: Collection Blind Pirate and Collection Dancing Bear (“magical, heart-stopping images of people in which you cannot see the eyes”), about which he continually researches and writes. From the former he collaborated with the International Center of Photography (ICP) to present the 2015 exhibition “Hunt’s Three Ring Circus: American Groups Before 1950.” The British photography festival Format exhibited a version of the exhibition with the title “Huddled Masses” in 2021 and Troupe/Troop was published by Dancing Bear Press in 2017.

He is the author of The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious, published in 2011. He has written about several photographers; including Brian Griffin (Loving Light), Roger Ballen, Erwin Olaf (Wrestling with Shadows), Duane Michals (Write Me Down an Ass) and Gerald Slota (two narcissists walk into a bar).

Highlights from his collections have been exhibited at the Rencontres in Arles (France); Musée de l’Élysée (Lausanne, Switzerland); FOAM (Amsterdam, Netherlands); FORMAT (Derby, United Kingdom), Foto Industria (Bologna, Italy), Fotofestiwal, (Łódź, Poland) and, in the US, at the George Eastman House (Rochester, NY); ICP, and elsewhere. He is also a teacher at the School of Visual Arts, Maine Media, Aperture, and ICP.Photography changed his life; it gave him one. 

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