When I think about going home, I am out on the road
A colloquy with Eric Darton
It’s 1956. Bill Hayward, aged 14, trades his prized Lionel electric trains for a 35mm camera. And the rest is mystery.
Laurels for Hayward’s second feature film to be released later this year.
When I asked myself how to approach a colloquy with Bill Hayward, Walt Whitman offered this advice: A man like him and never the usual terms.
Nonetheless, as a Point of Beginning, I sent Bill some fairly conventional prompts:
1) Your films are deeply enmeshed with literature, music, dance and movement. (I’m thinking about Pina Bausch, Alice Oswald, Gerry Stern, Fernando Pessoa, Pascal Quignard and a host of others). Who were and are your major influences, and how do these artists feed your process over time?
Can you describe what you feel they are communicating, both to you and the world?
2) What were some of the choicer moments you encountered in your career as a professional photographer? (I’m thinking of Pavarotti hitting on your ex-wife, and taking Roy Cohen’s portrait, but I’m sure there are many others.)
3) When you did the American Memory Project, traveling to scores of sites across the United States and making paint and paper photographs of everyday people, what places / experiences / situations made a lasting impression on you. (I’m thinking of your work with Native Americans, etc.)
4) Your films are hardly conventional narratives, yet some of the filmmakers you appreciate most do tell “stories.”
What aspects of their work have resonated with you — visually, psycologically, philosophically?
And in return, Bill offered a kind of cabinet of images and associations:
On the road. Montana, 1947.
With Pinky the Elephant, 1948 – in a land guarded by fire ants and dragons
American Memory Project, 2002
…and I had been “out on the road” a good deal of the 40’ and 50’s…and 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s.
Ernie Kovacs… jazz… Louis Armstrong’s bio’ first book I remember buying on my own.
1956, Trans Lux Theater, NYC
Fellini, La Strada
Dave Brubeck… Miles… Chet Baker
Nudie “Rhinestone Cowboy” in LA
Milton Berle… Bach, Beethoven, Handel, J.B. Lully, Mozart, THE BAROQUE…
Herman Melville, Copeland, Bill Evans, Ann Van den Broek – The Co(te)lette Film, Artaud, The Doors…
Samuel Beckett
Pina Bausch, Paul Taylor, Balanchine NYC Ballet
Gordon Lish, Finlandia by Jean Sibelius
Shakespeare, Greenaway, Tarkovsky, Bela Tarr, Eisenstein, Pedro Costa
Holy Motors by Leos Carax, Marcel Carne, Jean Cocteau, Alain Resnais, Miss Howell’s Dancing School
Ethel Merman, belting “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” June Taylor Dancers the Jackie Gleason Show, SW Pueblo dancers, The Prairie Trek Expedition, New Mexico, and southeest U.S.
Broadway show L’il Abner, Apache Dance, Jean-Luc Godard, Carmen by Carlos Suara.
Dancers know where their bodies are in Space.
“If you can’t dance nobody knows who you are”: Wallace Coffey, Chairman of the Comanche Nation
Roy Cohen, January 1986
There came a moment when Bill walked away from commercial photography, at which he excelled, and had been, by any measure, tremendously successful.
Hayward’s subsequent “reinvention of portrature,” has been evidenced in multiple gallery exhibitions and several books, notably Bill Hayward, Paglia Press, 1989, and Bad Behavior, Rizzoli, 2000.
A truly lush and gorgeous volume, Chasing Dragons, published by Gliteratti in 2015, serves as a combined artistic biography and retrospective of Hayward’s work to that date. The book includes myriad examples of his unorthodox imagemaking in photographic form and other media.
For the last decade, Hayward has focused on creating self-produced films drawing on the talents of an ensemble cast of dancers, actors and musicians as well as nonprofessional performers.
He is currently writing and illustrating the “script” for his already completed film.
Still from Beauty Is No Show. Click here for trailer.
Bill and his sister Janet chasing dragons around the Monument, 1946
OK, I’ll go to Hell… said Huckleberry Finn on heading out to the unknown, “the Territory,” wherein all of my image making (still, film and paint) takes place…
Found by Hayward in an otherwise empty donation drop-off bin near the railroad siding in Livingston, MT
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