Matt Hind

Matt Hind Artist Statement

Matt Hind is an artist who uses elements of documentary, fashion and portrait photography to explore themes of learnt masculinity and class. Working to reveal the myths of patriarchy, he looks at family space with reference to his own relationships. Hind’s ongoing work draws on imagined childhood memories to expose the difficulties of defining masculine identity and explores the influence of patriarchal culture on his own identity as a parent and image maker.

Coming from a background in fashion photography, Matt has been particularly interested in how men are depicted and how traditional ideas around masculinity are simultaneously preserved and challenged in visual culture through the medium of photography. Informed and motivated by memory and nostalgia from his own adolescent experience, Hind is interested in how forms of propaganda associated with certain ideals of family life also play a part in the process of maintaining social frameworks that continue to shape and privilege maleness and the degree to which this has been reinforced by the visual legacy of the family album. Hind contextualises his work with found photography from family archives with the aim of juxtaposing images of a different provenance to aid in a discussion about how we learn gendered behaviour.

Matt Hind responds to images of men through several generations in his family. He has photographed himself, his father and his son. He has become less concerned with the impact of a single image and more interested in the ability of pairing images together to provoke a layered or nuanced response for the viewer. In addition, Hind accompanies the images with text from a letter written to him when he was 11 years old. The handwriting is that of his grandfather.

Hind is inspired by British Mid-Century painter Keith Vaughan and his ambiguous presentations of male kinship in 1950s Britain as well as artists that have sought to explore and offer fresh narratives surrounding the family space. Siân Davey, Larry Sultan, Judith Black and Sally Mann have been central to the development of his practice, but through his own personal approach of blending family archives with his own imagery he has inevitably ended up exploring how his own sense of self has been framed by cultural, societal and familial expectation about what it is to be a man.

As part of an ongoing exploration into the shifting nature of masculinity, Hind has created a body of work in collaboration with his father, Geoffrey and his son Sam.