Biography
John Huddleston received his B.A. in psychology from Yale University, completed his M.F.A. in photography at San Francisco State University, and received a degree in Spanish from the Centro Intercultural de Baja California in Ensenada, Mexico. He teaches visual art at Middlebury College. Huddleston has had one-person exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, Wave Hill in New York City, Stony Brook University Art Gallery, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum, the DeCordova Museum, the University of Michigan Art Museum at Ann Arbor, the Wichita Art Museum, the Lehigh University DuBois Gallery, the Triton Museum, the Laurentian University Museum and the University of California at Riverside Art Gallery, among others. He has participated in group shows across the country.
Huddleston’s latest book, At Home in the Northern Forest; Photographs of the Changing Vermont Landscape, was published in 2020 by George F. Thompson with an essay by Bill McKibben. The Northern Forest of North America is one of the world’s largest contiguous forests. The artist brings his contemporary vision to reveal the dynamic, transitory forms and processes of this complex ecosystem. His photographs were made with precise attention to ordinary beauty and circumstance as he hiked in the Vermont woods he has known for thirty years. Through his photographs we gain a deep appreciation and understanding of the Northern Forest and how proper forest management enhances both commercial and ecological interests. Under Huddleston’s care, natural change is embodied in a new type of photographic composite created from exposures made of the same scene in different seasons. This difficult, labor-intensive process elicits direct comprehension of cyclic time. The text explores the biology, economics, history, philosophy, and vulnerability of this vast regional landscape.
Huddleston won an Andrea Frank Foundation Grant for his book, Killing Ground: Photographs of the Civil War and the Changing American Landscape, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 2003. Killing Ground moves from the visual facts of history into the realm of modern America. Battlefields across the country were photographed to examine change or stasis in the landscape since the violence of the 1860's. These focal points reflect consequences of the war and resonate with the suffering of American self-definition. The images challenge the memory and meaning of place in American culture. He was interviewed about the book on National Public Radio and it was reviewed in the Sunday New York Times Book Review.
Huddleston has also received grants from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Arts Council, the Ada Howe Kent Foundation, and the Vermont Community Foundation. His photographs have appeared in Log Journal, Orion Magazine, Harper’s, the New England Review, DoubleTake Magazine, and the New York Times and Boston Globe newspapers, among others. His work is in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Chrysler Museum of Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts at Stanford University and the Berkeley Art Museum. He has written for the Chicago Tribune’s Books section.
His second book, Healing Ground: Walking the Farms of Vermont was published in early 2012 by the Center for American Places at Columbia College. With an unromantic, democratic attention, Huddleston records agricultural cycles of life and death. His work draws on the ordinary and emphasizes commitment to place. While acknowledging problems, these photographs and the accompanying essay by environmental leader Bill McKibben affirm the beauty of a productive, sustainable, working landscape.
From photographer Robert Adams: “John Huddleston’s pictures of small-scale agricultural lands are fresh and deeply felt. They are documentary in the sense that a lyric poem can be documentary, a convincing record of the poet’s affection.”
Huddleston’s photography has been included prominently in these recent books on photographic art and culture: Remixing the Civil War, Meditations on the Sesquicentennial edited by Thomas Brown; Land Matters by Liz Wells; and Thoughts on Landscape by Frank Gohlke.
Photograph by Suzanne Potente
