Jessica Hines Conjures a Life from the Aftermath of War

2Share

“How do you make pictures about a person who doesn't exist anymore?” This was the fundamental question facing Jessica Hines while sorting through a box of her brother Gary’s letters, photographs, and other objects from his military service in Vietnam some 35 years after his return—25 years after his life ended in a battle with post-traumatic stress.

Photographs © Jessica Hines

A box containing the belongings of Sp/4 Gary A. Hines, packed by his mother following his suicide, ten years after his return from Vietnam  
A box containing the belongings of Sp/4 Gary A. Hines, packed by his mother following his suicide, ten years after his return from Vietnam

Hines was already well versed in probing hidden realms to construct complex worlds in her photographs, having made pictures centered around such themes since college. “My first experiences were with infrared,” she says. “I was absolutely taken with it because it's an invisible world that we can't see. I was also inspired by my dreams; they were so vivid, and weird, and interesting. I've got about 20 years’ worth of dreams written down in a journal. Then I started to read Carl Jung, and that led to an investigation into the nature of reality. I’m just fascinated with what makes this world tick, what lies below the surface."

To create the deeply personal photographs that would culminate in her book, My Brother’s War, Hines says, “With Gary, I became a research investigator, calling people out of the blue, 35 years later. And I found people who knew him, and who sent me photographs from Vietnam saying, ‘I want you to know, I'm the real deal. I knew your brother, here's a picture of him.’”

Jessica Hines is a featured speaker in B&H’s Depth of Field conference. Register today and tune in live from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., March 23-24, 2022.

Autographed copies of My Brother’s War are available through Hines’s website.
Autographed copies of My Brother’s War are available through Hines’s website.

A Need for Family and Friends

Twelve years her senior, Gary was the devoted big brother she idolized from afar during a childhood complicated by circumstance. A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Jessica was a “surprise baby,” born to older parents with health issues and two teenage sons, all living in a cramped three-room house. Beginning at age four, she was sent to live with other families—a revolving series of relatives and neighbors—setting in motion “a constant back and forth” that would color her childhood and make her feel like an outsider from a very early age.

A snapshot in front of the Hines family home showing Jessica, age 4, with Gary at 16  
A snapshot in front of the Hines family home showing Jessica, age 4, with Gary at 16

She recalls, “I was taken to a house, and I remember having a sense that my parents were going to leave me there. They were trying to say, ‘Hey, look at this toy over here, you might really like that.’ And I remember thinking, ‘I don't like that toy, I don't want to be left here. I don't know these people.’ They were relatives,” she adds, “but I didn't have any relationship with them at all and they were virtual strangers to me at that point. Nobody ever explained what was happening to me.”

During these early years in unfamiliar surroundings, Hines became very aware of the need for a friend. “At that stage in life, I grew attached to random objects,” she recalls. “Because I wondered if I would ever see my parents again, I felt sad when things were given away, or discarded. I knew the meaning of ‘goodbye forever’ from a very young age.”

Among the few threads of contact Jessica had with her family were post cards and letters her father sent, along with funny little pictures he drew. Mr. Hines was a professional artist, and his daughter shared in his artistic interests and abilities. “I always drew pictures, all through my childhood, and I was praised for that,” she recalls.

Among the elements incorporated in My Brother’s War are battle drawings her father, Lee Granger Hines, made as a child. These drawings are featured as end pages, inside the front and back covers of the book.
Among the elements incorporated in My Brother’s War are battle drawings her father, Lee Granger Hines, made as a child. These drawings are featured as end pages, inside the front and back covers of the book.

In another early memory, Hines was taken to visit someone in the hospital and decided to draw a picture of an animal while in the waiting room, accidentally leaving it behind when it was time to go. “I remember crying and crying with the thought I had abandoned my friend; that it was left in the waiting room, in the dark, and I’d never get it back,” she says. “I guess I identified with that drawing as being left alone because I kept being moved from one place to the next.”

Finding Life in Photographs

For much of Jessica’s childhood, direct contact with her family was limited to visits at Christmas and a few weeks in the summer. She was living with an aunt and uncle in Memphis when her brother was ordered to report for military duty, in 1967. He arrived in Vietnam on her eighth birthday. The next year, she spent the first half of fourth grade in Saint Louis with her parents, and she was there when her brother visited on a furlough over Christmas. “I have a funny memory of us going someplace together on a city bus,” she says. “Gary was telling me he hoped I understood that being sent away to live with others didn’t mean I wasn't loved. That conversation has stayed with me.”

A collage of family portraits depicts a young Gary in his front yard, next to a portrait in the same location after his return from Vietnam.  
A collage of family portraits depicts a young Gary in his front yard, next to a portrait in the same location after his return from Vietnam.

During this time, she had access to a camera fitted with flash cubes. “I took some photographs and thought it was magic, it was just like a magic box,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘Look at these little flat squares of life, frozen in time.’ They seemed to be imbued with a life of their own like the drawings I made as a child. Pictures of people and places I loved became important to me as I moved from place to place.”

Hines returned to her relatives in Memphis to finish fourth grade, only to be sent back to her parents for eighth grade after her uncle’s job was transferred. That Christmas, she received her first camera from her next-door neighbor—an Olympus fixed-lens rangefinder. “They knew I was fascinated with photography and that my parents couldn’t afford to buy a camera for me,” she explains.

These neighbors became like surrogate parents, walking her to school, inviting her over for homemade ice cream, and taking her on car trips. Hines also found inspiration in their daughter’s teaching career. “I looked up to her and thought teaching seemed like it would make for a good life,” she recounts. “I loved the idea of sharing knowledge and helping to make the world a better place through education.”

Artistic Discovery Coupled with Personal Loss

In high school, Hines was enrolled in a special ‘honors art’ program in recognition of her artistic talents. “I went there every afternoon for advanced classes like acting, ceramics, metalsmithing, and photography, where I was introduced to darkroom work as a sophomore,” she says. “I absolutely loved it and spent as much time there as possible.”

By this time, her brother was back from Vietnam and living in Colorado. She was thrilled when he invited her out for a visit during summer vacation. “I found a letter where he talked to my father about it,” says Hines. “He was just being this good big brother, explaining, ‘She's my sister, and I’d really like to spend time with her. I'd like her to come out and stay, and she can bring her friend.’”

A portrait of Gary with 4-year-old Jessica is juxtaposed with a portrait made during her Colorado visit. Hines often includes details of her hands in photographs to reference a self-portrait
A portrait of Gary with 4-year-old Jessica is juxtaposed with a portrait made during her Colorado visit. Hines often includes details of her hands in photographs to reference a self-portrait

The two 15-year-olds had the time of their lives, being driven through the mountains and touring old cowboy towns. Although Gary had been diagnosed with a “service-connected nervous condition” after being honorably discharged from the military, Jessica had little knowledge of his troubles at that time. It wasn’t until embarking on her project when she discovered a letter he had written to their mother later that year, which hinted at the extent of his suffering.

“You were wondering what is bothering me?” Gary wrote in September 1974. “Well, I just have not been too happy out here. I mean not happy with myself because Denver is ok. I seemed to have lost my confidence, I get depressed and can’t get out of the depression. Maybe I should go and see a doctor again. I guess I will do that.”

By the next year, Gary had arranged to transfer his post office job from Colorado back to St. Louis. For her part, Jessica was juggling a packed high school schedule with a full-time job. “I wanted to go to college, and I wanted to make money,” she says. “I don't know how I did it, but I worked 40 hours a week during my last two years of high school and part of freshman year of college, while also getting As in school.”

But just as she was discovering her passions and enjoying academic success, Jessica’s world was rocked by a succession of personal losses. Between the ages of 15 and 18, she lost both of her closest foster parents, one of them to suicide, and her father, followed by her brother at 21, and her mother two days after her 30th birthday.

Building A Creative Life

Given the extent of trauma and upheaval in her early life, Hines buried all associations with her turbulent past and refused to let them resurface for many years, focusing instead on building a career in the arts. She earned a BFA in photography from Washington University, in St Louis, and an MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, starting to teach while still a student. As graduation drew near, she began applying for teaching jobs, soon landing a tenure-track position at Georgia Southern University (GSU). In contrast to the near-constant movement that marked her childhood, Hines grew roots in Georgia, building a house near the banks of a wetland, surrounded by the natural world.

An academic schedule and the monotony of small-town life were conducive to a focus on art making and reading about the sciences. To inspire her photography, she dialoged with authors, filling book margins with comments about the nature of reality and life’s other mysteries. “I spent a summer transferring underlined passages from favorite books into a journal,” she says of her working methods. “I referenced that journal for ideas when I’d go into the studio to work on my series Prima Materia.”

The image “Reservoir of Memory” from “Prima Materia” hints at methods Hines would employ in creating work for “My Brother’s War.” The Vietnamese dictionary pictured here was a gift from her brother.
The image “Reservoir of Memory” from “Prima Materia” hints at methods Hines would employ in creating work for “My Brother’s War.” The Vietnamese dictionary pictured here was a gift from her brother.

Equally curious about the subtle details of her immediate surroundings, one mid-winter day she happened to notice sunlight creating rainbow effects across the surface of the nearby wetland. “I went down to the edge and thought, ‘I've got to get in the rainbow.’ So, I went out and bought chest-high waders, and started making stills of the bright rainbow colors and prism effects.”

She also began to wonder about phantom traces of animal life visible in the swamp and the strange, otherworldly sounds she heard—but couldn't see—at night. This mystery prompted her to purchase a couple of Bushnell trail cameras and attach them to trees in the swamp. Says Hines, “I started to capture footage, but the real question was in positioning the cameras. I had to think like an animal—which I believe I can do,” she says, attributing the close connection she feels to wild animals to the trauma of her early childhood and a common sense of primal fear.

After starting with one or two cameras, Hines enlarged her scope, covering the swamp with as many as 16 units. She steers away from models with a battery chamber that opens from the bottom, since the battery could drop under water when positioned at a low angle. When setting up cameras, she recommends being particularly attentive to weeds or trees that might slowly grow and interfere with the camera over time. “You might not notice it at first,” she says, “but when the wind blows, it can trigger the motion sensor over and over again, and you’ll end up with hundreds of videos where nothing happened.”

Hines says of the videos from her series, A Private Map of the Animate, “The animals resemble actors in a silent film, entering and exiting as if on cue, all playing out serendipitously, in real time.”

Since beginning this exploration, Hines has amassed thousands of short clips, collectively known as A Private Map of the Animate. She captures footage in all seasons, day and night, but she is especially fond of her black-and-white nighttime clips, which are made using infrared. “I like the mystery of the night, partly because I can't see what's happening,” she says. “I like to say, ‘I can see what goes on when I'm not looking.’ It's my other set of eyes—many eyes—out there in the swamp.”

Reclaiming Her Brother from Shards of His Past

Hines first encountered the box containing Gary’s belongings after her mother’s passing, in 1988. “We had to sell our childhood home, so I brought the box back to Georgia, and put it away high on a closet shelf,” she says. “I didn't want to have anything to do with it.”

But in 2005, a political science professor and friend from GSU asked Hines if he could borrow her brother’s letters to show his students, leading her to retrieve the box and immerse herself in its contents. “When I read the letters, I was that kid again,” she says. “My childhood mind just surfaced. I could hear my brother's voice and I was reliving that time period. There was something nice about it; it was like he was here again. I could hear his voice, and that helped.”

In the earliest work from My Brother’s War, Hines created intricate still lifes from her brother’s letters, arranged with old lead soldiers and other objects she unearthed from his box of belongings.
In the earliest work from My Brother’s War, Hines created intricate still lifes from her brother’s letters, arranged with old lead soldiers and other objects she unearthed from his box of belongings.

 

Following the childhood prompt, Hines began by constructing intricate still lifes that juxtapose Gary’s letters with old wartime toys. Initially, she worked with a Nikon FM 2 and Sigma 50 mm macro lens, which allowed her to get in close and capture details in sharp focus. “I would get ideas from Gary's pictures and my father’s childhood drawings and then start working,” she says. “I was using black-and-white film, and thought I'd finish the series pretty quickly.”

Another method Hines used to generate ideas before setting to work in the studio involved channeling her musings through several pages of stream-of-consciousness writing. “Ideas would just drop out of nowhere, it worked really well for me,” she says. “I think a lot of the surface chatter in our minds can get in the way of creativity, but writing it down frees up other thoughts that start to surface.”

Hines faced an early creative hurdle after reading the last of her brother’s many letters. “It was tough,” she says, “but I knew secrets existed that I had to uncover, so I started to go through other things in the box.” While leafing through Gary’s Vietnamese/English dictionary she discovered ‘hand-written declarations of love’ from a Vietnamese woman scattered randomly among the pages. “I have never been able to find out her identity and can only guess at who she was,” Hines writes about the resulting photographs. “She is a mystery that I will probably never solve. Just the same, I can't help but imagine who she was and who she might have become, provided she survived the war.”

A tiny magnifying glass enlarges the handwritten note added to a page of her brother’s Vietnamese dictionary, evidence of a love story that will remain forever a mystery.  
A tiny magnifying glass enlarges the handwritten note added to a page of her brother’s Vietnamese dictionary, evidence of a love story that will remain forever a mystery.

Discovering Digital

Ever more determined to understand what happened to her brother during the war, Hines expanded from a focus on Gary’s personal effects to tracking down wartime maps. Another early find was a DVD of war-era films made in Chu Lai, where he had been stationed. In summer 2007, she made the first of two trips to Vietnam, using Gary’s letters and photographs as a guide, “hoping to witness some remnant of what he had seen.”

She had just begun to explore digital photography, after borrowing a friend’s Canon Rebel to fulfill a tight editorial deadline. “I really went kicking and screaming into the digital age,” she admits. “I had spent my entire life learning the darkroom, and I loved it. But I needed to come up with an image quickly, so I couldn’t use film.”

Despite her initial dread, Hines was immediately hooked on digital, exclaiming, “Look what I'm missing… this is fantastic.” Before long she had her own Canon Rebel and a 24-105mm lens, which she dragged across the world on her first trip. “Between the camera and lenses, it was so big and heavy,” she admits. “Being the compulsive person I am, I had to have all these backups and I didn't trust that I wouldn’t lose things.”

The following summer, Hines opted for the compact size of a Canon Powershot G-7 camera during her return trip. This camera had the added benefit of an integrated zoom lens and a macro feature she could use for close ups. “Small and lightweight, the Canon G-series was perfect for me as I navigated rough terrain,” she says.

In the book’s final chapter, archival photographs mix with elements from a candlelit floral display to symbolize “the healing of bad memories in order to bring about their transformation to another, more positive, form.” These images are further enhanced by Leica Q’s rich color palette. 
In the book’s final chapter, archival photographs mix with elements from a candlelit floral display to symbolize “the healing of bad memories in order to bring about their transformation to another, more positive, form.” These images are further enhanced by Leica Q’s rich color palette.

Her subsequent upgrades to the Canon G9 and G12 made this camera model a mainstay of the project, until a sudden influx of money in 2018 allowed her to realize the lifelong dream of owning a Leica. “The macro feature on the Leica Q was a major selling point,” she says. “The image quality is wonderful, and I love the sharpness.”

Tinkering with Light, Reflections, and Enlargement

Referring to her creative process as, “like street photography in slow motion,” Hines prefers using natural light in her image making, which she supplements with reflections from strategically placed objects to direct the light where she wants it.

She remains open to chance in her work, balancing intense effort with an eye for serendipitous discoveries, like the folds of a letter forming into the shape of a tent. Another spark of enlightenment occurred when Hines started to scan her brother’s archival photographs for use in her imagery. “It's one thing to look at these tiny photos, and then suddenly you can zoom into areas,” she explains. “There were a lot of small details I never noticed before, further inspiring my imagination.”

During this photo session, Hines employed the ephemeral qualities of reflected light and shadow to emphasize telling details like the creation of a water tornado and the projection of a symbolic halo onto her brother’s photo-booth portrait. 

During one photo session, Hines spent hours working on an open porch, trying to get a complex mix of objects, shadows, reflections, and sunlight to converge. Suddenly the wind blew a plant, which cast its shadow in the same shape of a spoon used to create a water tornado in a glass of liquid. In another image, light reflected onto her brother’s photo booth portrait in the shape of a halo. “It was just chance,” she exclaims. “I had a mirror on the other side of the porch and the light hit that, bouncing onto the photograph, creating a halo, to scale, over Gary's head. I was so excited. So, things just happen, and I go with them.”

Connecting with Gary’s Forever Brothers

As she continued to plumb the depths of her brother’s wartime experience, a tiny memo pad containing his army buddies’ names and contact details offered potential lifelines to the past. “Now it seems sort of old hat, but back in 2006 I was new at online research as a way of discovering people and finding their phone numbers,” she says. “One person would tell me something that would lead me to another, and I just kept digging.”

Her determination and skill converged with an attempt to locate one of her brother’s buddies with an unusual name, someone she had known as a child. Repeated calls to his home phone went unanswered, then she discovered an app that allowed her to track down a neighbor living on his street. After calling them and explaining her purpose, Hines asked if they would deliver a message. “Lo and behold, he called me back,” she says. “Indeed, it was Gary’s good friend, who shared information that I did not previously have.”

By Googling her brother’s former army companies, Hines discovered there were upcoming plans for a reunion in Ocean City, Maryland. “I thought, ‘Okay, I can fly to DC and rent a car. I've never seen the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, so I’ll go see that too.’”

The army-issued memo pad in which Gary recorded the names and addresses of his wartime buddies is captured here with theatrical flair.  
The army-issued memo pad in which Gary recorded the names and addresses of his wartime buddies is captured here with theatrical flair.

The trip was a revelatory and moving experience. “The men in the unit were most welcoming to me and I felt comfortable in their presence,” Hines writes in her book. “I watched tough grown men cry as they told their stories, and weep as they met one another for the first time—in some cases—in 40 years.”

The Vietnam-era photo album she brought along as a means for connecting proved particularly revealing during a second reunion she attended, when the person whose name was first on Gary’s memo pad walked up and introduced himself. Says Hines, “Because we both brought photo albums from Viet Nam, we noted that Henry had taken many of the photographs I've had for nearly all of my life—and he had alternate photographic versions of that mental reality of mine.”

While the box of Gary’s belongings that Hines explored with such intention offered many clues to the mysteries of his life, meeting his wartime comrades in person gave her intimate access to stories she could never have imagined on her own. “By visiting with these men at the reunion, I was brought infinitely closer to understanding what it meant to go to war in that country,” she says. 

The Path to Publication 

After more than a dozen years of sustained work, Hines knew she was ready to turn her brother’s story into a book. In summer 2019, she went to the photo festival in Arles, France, with a plan to show her portfolio, writing to several publishers to request meetings in advance of her trip. In addition to a box of exhibition-size fine art prints, she took a book prototype created from an online template, which she describes as, “a greatest hits of pictures. It was very stiff,” she admits, “But it showed the pictures I thought were strongest, edited in the proper order.”

Her meeting with British publisher Dewi Lewis was successful from the start. They agreed that the story’s delicate nature would need a more personal touch than her existing prototype. While Gary’s letters are a central element in many of Hines’s photographs, Lewis suggested adding an extra layer to the story by inserting many pages of facsimile documents in the book as a narrative element.

A composite image featuring a snapshot of Gary in Asian clothing bookended by a letter to his father. In the letter, he explains, “The Vietnamese really dig me ’cause I am different from everyone else.”
A composite image featuring a snapshot of Gary in Asian clothing bookended by a letter to his father. In the letter, he explains, “The Vietnamese really dig me ’cause I am different from everyone else.”

 

“I just love the way the letters went in, but it was like putting together a serious puzzle,” says Hines of the subsequent editing process. “I had to reread about 100 letters, some that are seven or eight pages long. A stressful part of the process for me was deciding which letters would be most historically significant and of interest to the reader, while also telling Gary’s story.” To further complicate reproducing the letters in print, the translucent onionskin paper that Gary had written on allowed ink to bleed through his double-sided missives. After scanning each page against a black background, Hines spent most of a summer adjusting every pen stroke in Adobe Photoshop, blending the back sides out to make each text more legible.

Reproduced on vellum-like paper stock at a narrower width than the photographs, these pages approximate the physicality of the originals, complete with timeworn creases and decorative embellishments. According to Hines, production specs dictated grouping the letters in 8-page sections with 16 pages of photographs in between. This rigid framework made sequencing the elements particularly challenging in order to maintain a narrative flow as the story unfolds across the book’s eleven chapters.

Hines created this image based on a story she heard from Gary’s best friend, who was also in Vietnam. She writes, “He told me of a vision he had of my brother appearing to him in light, about the night sky, about the stars of Chu Lai overhead.”  
Hines created this image based on a story she heard from Gary’s best friend, who was also in Vietnam. She writes, “He told me of a vision he had of my brother appearing to him in light, about the night sky, about the stars of Chu Lai overhead.”

In her introduction to the chapter, The Reflection, Hines writes, “Making the photographs is, for me, a way of coping and at the same time, a way for me to understand what happened.” She goes on to describe her visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., and to address the fact that this memorial—solemn and cherished tribute that it is—does not tell the full story of losses resulting from that conflict. As she notes, “Missing from the wall are the names of those who died war-related deaths: from suicide, from injuries, and from exposure to harmful chemical substances.”

On the day she visited, Hines wrote a note to her brother and taped it to the wall, so his name would be there for that day. With the publication of My Brother’s War, she has accomplished so much more than that, carving out space for the name and the acutely personal story of Sp/4 Gary A. Hines to exist in perpetuity, in recognition of the scores of unmentioned individuals lost to the aftermath of war.

“Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.” —George Elliot

Did you attend B&H’s Depth of Field conference and listen to Jessica Hines’s presentation? Please let us know what you thought in the Comments section, below.

2 Comments

Very interesting project. Thanks, Jill

Hey John Harris, thanks so much for commenting on Jessica Hines's My Brother's War project. It is indeed a very compelling documentation, and a beautifully published book. It's also worth noting that Jessica has been posting the results of her continued research into her brother's life on social media, which is fascinating, as well as fairly heartbreaking, to follow. Check it out on Facebook, and thanks for reading the Explora blog!