KEVIN HOTH

My name is Kevin Hoth. I have been making art pictures since 1994. I have also done video and installation art, graphic design and commercial photography. I have taught college courses for nearly twenty years and have shown work in around a hundred exhibitions nationally and internationally. My website is https://kevinhoth.com 

[thewoodbetween]

Arthur Lismer - A Clear Winter

[kevinhoth]

June 1997- Oaxaca, Mexico - workshop with Mary Ellen Mark.

In 1996 I had done a Maine Photographic Workshop (now called the Maine Media Workshops) with a National Geographic photographer. I met the workshop founder David Lyman during my stay and got his email. I wanted to do the Mary Ellen Mark workshop down in Oaxaca the following year and said I could help out with my Spanish language skills. David told me to keep in touch and that I could work in exchange for the cost of the workshop in Mexico. I booked a plane ticket to San Antonio, took a bus the rest of the way down and arrived the morning of the workshop. David was there and I saw Mary Ellen and I announced that I was here to help. She knew nothing about it! It was eventually sorted out and I was the contact sheet printer for each student. I was enrolled in the workshop so I would meet with Mary Ellen in the morning to look over any images I had taken (printed myself the night before in the darkroom), go shoot during the day, come back later for talks and presentations, go to sleep, then wake up at midnight to print everyone’s contact sheets. Then I would walk home, go to sleep and do it all over again. The workshop lasted ten days, and I think the most valuable thing I learned from it was that a photographer should move their body and not just stand in one place shooting from the head. Look for more interesting vantage points. I also learned that if you wanted good portraits you had to connect with people not just point a camera at them.

Although I continued to shoot color slide film during the black and white workshop with MEM, the images below are ones I made before the workshop.  The first image is of a family friend who had moved to the town of San Miguel de Allende back in the 1920s and was one of the first americans to expatriate down there. He was somehow involved with setting up the art school in town. I photographed him in his garden where he grew a variety of orchids.

The next image is one I obviously shot at a bullfight. Although I went to one here and later one in Spain, I would not attend another one for moral reasons. This image won a photo contest at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Coincidentally, my grandfather (different last name) had been the Editor and President for many years before this happened.

[kevinhoth]

1997 - Utah photo booth self portraits.

Just playing with the self in the photo container. I had typed something up and placed it into one of the lenses of the glasses. I don’t recall what. 

[kevinhoth]

1997 - Salt Lake City, Utah

I moved to Salt Lake City and lived with one of my oldest friends and some other like-minded snowboarder ruffians. I basically lived in the living room behind a simple wall that had been framed up to add another “bedroom.” There was no door so there was not a lot of privacy. Here I would type my love letters on handmade collages to the woman in Milwaukee on whom I had an enormous crush. 

One day one of my roommates came in and said there was a huge car crash down the street. I was interested in photographing it so I walked down to take a look. I made this shot of the blue car on top of the hood of the Volvo. Volvos are known to be tanks and this one was no exception. The hood was barely dented.

[kevinhoth]

1996 - Minneapolis

I made this picture during a visit to see my roommate who had moved up to Minneapolis. It has always felt like a very surreal image to me.

At first thought the image below has felt like a bland Americana example. On second thought it shows a premonition of what I would later be doing with mirrors - merging the space behind me with the space in front of me.

[kevinhoth]

1996 - Slides

Hand made slide experiments with highway signage references.

[kevinhoth]

1996 - WI

I began to do more black and white photography specifically multiple exposures and sandwiched negatives. These seemed to reflect the current state of my relationship which was faltering. I had moved in with my then girlfriend and it started to all feel very suffocating. One day when she was out of the apartment, I made images of myself crammed in by furniture - pretty easy to psychologically unpack. She later left for Mexico and though the plan was that I would come meet her I never did. 

Instead I moved to Utah to live with friends and do the snowboard bum life. Before I had left town I fell for one of the photo people I was hanging around with in Milwaukee. We exchanged a lot of letters (I was typing them on an old typewriter onto collages then) while I lived in Salt Lake City. That spring I came back to Milwaukee after a knee injury and that was when we reconnected. The photo seen below was taken when a bunch of us darkroom rats went on a photo scavenger hunt and had stopped at a bar for shots.

[kevinhoth]

1995 / 1996 - Back In Wisconsin

I moved back to Wisconsin and lived with my folks again briefly before moving to the East Side of Milwaukee near the university. The shot above was taken from the second story porch of our house on Cramer Street. The car had been sitting there a while and rumor had it that it was probably the owner who had set it on fire to collect the insurance. 

I was working a couple of day jobs and taking classes at UW-Milwaukee. I ended up taking color photography classes and learned to print analog color photographs which was tricky business. I began to experiment with sandwiching negatives which for me was an exploration in combining memories. I often felt that one experience would trigger the memory of another. By combining the photos I felt like I was connecting time within a physical object. 

I also took an art installation class in which I used slide projectors to do live shows projected onto large collages of paper scraps I had collected on my travels around the country. There was a slide projector for each of the cardinal directions: North, South, East, West. I projected images that I had taken in those places onto paper collages full of scraps from those regions of the country.

Another project I created was an absurd narrative called CHARMED LIFE: BRED RESTLESS about driving from my parents’ house in the suburbs to the city to buy cigarettes. Each step along the path there were silly situations that I set up that were obstacles to my goal. I projected the larger image and then there were two other slide projectors with graphics on them. One projector had the standard street sign and then I would change the words to something odd from my script. I was very interested in the generic, emotionless aspect of street signage and how it could be turned into something oddball and humorous.

[kevinhoth]

1995 - Small dip into Mexico.

On the way back to the Midwest I was curious about Mexico since I’d never been. I nervously drove across the border and stayed for about an hour. I think I may have even bought some kind of temporary car insurance before the crossing. I found my old navigaton map and see my brief visit was to the town of San Luis Rîo Colorado. 

[kevinhoth]

1995 - Dipped toe in the Pacific then hightailed it back home.

These two images are multiple exposure experiments that I shot at the beach near Torrey Pines, I think. This shows me starting to explore the possibilities of color photography.

[kevinhoth]

1995 - The Extended Road Trip (WY, UT, AZ, CA) and then back to the Midwest.

After leaving Gunnison, I met up with friends who were on a ski trip in Jackson Hole. My friends and I had done this trip before with our college ski and snowboard club. The most memorable event was accidentally hitting a deer on the way to Jackson Hole ski resort. I think I may have been peeling an orange with one hand like an idiot. I hit the rump of the deer and then it ran up over the berm on the side of the highway and out of sight. There was also a crack in my windshield from this that I later had fixed at my grandmother’s winter home in Palm Desert, CA. After Jackson, my old friend Jim and I did a mountain bike trip to Moab. 

I continued on through Arizona visiting my uncle in Prescott and then landing in Palm Desert where I stayed with my Grandma Gerry for a week while I got over a cold and had my windshield fixed. I then continued on to the coast for only a couple nights. I rolled up in the campus of one of the colleges thinking it would be easy to find somewhere to crash. Turned out everyone was on spring break. I slept (not well) under a manicured bush in my sleeping bag in the ritzy town of La Jolla.

I’ve always loved the California shoreline so I’m not sure why I didn’t stay and look for a job. Instead I dipped a toe in the Pacific and then drove straight back to WI in about two days. My longest stretch was eighteen hours and this is the only time I have ever peed in the car while driving. I think it was a used Yahoo chocolate milk container but my memory is dodgy.

While resting in Palm Desert my grandma and I went out for a movie. She of course let me chose the film and for some reason I chose The Doors about the band of the same name. I should’ve known there would be crazy drugs and sex scenes. About an hour and half in (the movie is 2 hours and 20 minutes in runtime) my grandma got up. I apologized for the movie and she said “Oh, no, it’s okay I just need to move my old knees.” That night we were watching Connie Chung on the news and she offhandedly and without judgement asked me if I had ever taken drugs. I said “No, it’s not really my thing.” She replied “Yeah, me neither.” This was the first time that I related to my grandmother on more of an adult level and it felt nice. On a side note she lived to age 101.

While I was in Palm Desert I decided to camp one night in Joshua Tree National Park. The tent I bought then I still actually use here in Colorado when camping with my daughter. This trip was significant because Joshua Tree has become one of my favorite places to visit as an adult. I have made some of my best photographic work there. 

1. The back of a re-used sign at a rest stop somewhere in Arizona.

2. Double foot. Hot springs near Taos, NM.

3. Desert wildflowers alongside the highway. CA.

4. Chaco, New Mexico.

5. Joshua Tree National Park, CA. 

[kevinhoth]

Early 1995

After leaving NM I decide to head up to Colorado and stay with my friends in Gunnison. I ended up crashing on their couch for about six weeks. I worked in the cafeteria at Crested Butte Resort and got a free ski pass for working about 12 hours per week. I also cleaned condos. One side job I had was clearing snow out of condos that had been filled after a smallish avalanche crashed into them. I recall opening the door to the outside and there was snow up to my chest with the impression of the door’s details. 

The image seen here was the pop-out stop sign on the side of an old school bus that hadn’t moved in quite some time. 

[kevinhoth]

Late Fall 1994 - Go West, Young Man

After some time regrouping at home with the folks in Wisconsin, I decided to move to New Mexico sight unseen. I stopped and visited with friends and family along the way in Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, and New Mexico. I speak Spanish and had always been fascinated by Native American culture so New Mexico seemed like the perfect place to become a resident. I spent several weeks driving around the state before finding an ad in Taos for a spare room. I lived in a small adobe cabin at the end of El Salto Road in Arroyo Seco which is a tiny town on the way up to Taos Ski Valley. I lived with a fellow ski bum and an old slightly schizophrenic woman from San Francisco. Her car - an old International Harvester - was stuck on our road for the winter so we would give her rides into town. She drank too much and would complain about all the secret agents watching her in the local tavern. She did cook for me on occasion which was nice. My “room” consisted of a futon mattress in the middle of the living room surrounded by rugs that hung from the ceiling. I was working as a valet at Taos Ski Valley which did not allow snowboarders. I had to drive to other resorts to get my turns in. I got tired of my job and roommates and decided to leave and visit my friend Kristin who was living in Gunnison, CO. 

1. Taos plaza.

2. Self portrait in Arroyo Seco cabin.

3. Below: two drawings I made while living in the cabin. They have a lot of similarity to native american symbols and minimalist forms in the pueblo pottery.

[kevinhoth]

1994 - Postgrad Road Trip East

After graduating college my first desire was to get the heck out of Wisconsin. My dear friend Kristin and I decided to do a road trip to the Northeast of the US to visit friends that I had made while living abroad in Spain my junior year of college. After seeing friends in Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut, and Nantucket Island (Where I had lived for a summer between freshman and sophomore year with my girlfriend).

Aside from seeing friends I also made a lot of black and white pictures. In New York we stumbled upon Wigfest (I think that’s what it was called). I had never seen live drag performers and I happen to have made a capture of Ru Paul performing live on stage. I have to look through my negs to scan it!

1st photo: Kristin on the Block Island Ferry.

2nd photo: Men waiting to get off the BI Ferry. 

3rd photo: Men speaking with an elevated woman. Faneuil Hall, Boston.

4th: New York City.

[kevinhoth]

1994 - one step back before moving forward.

From the time I was very young I drew and painted. I won my first art “contest” in 1st grade with a drawing at the Wisconsin State Fair. 

Over the years, I became somewhat skilled at it and later my favorite type of drawing was figure drawing. This tied into my fascination with the workings of the human body that had come out of my Anatomy and Physiology class in high school. The first drawing here is from my Figure Drawing class in college. I felt very accomplished and my professor gave me a lot of compliments which didn’t hurt. 

My high school art teacher had actually chosen me for an art program whereby select students from around the Milwaukee area were bussed down to the Milwaukee Art Museum one day a week during their last semester of high school. It was called Art Satellite. The art museum was our classroom and we would get art history lectures as well as technical lessons all from within the museum. it was one of the most formative experiences in terms of my relationship with a museum collection. My parents had always been very involved in the arts in Milwaukee and they had even served on various boards at the museum when I was a child. The Milwaukee Art Museum will always feel like my home art institution. The smell of it is almost as familiar as my childhood home.  

My high school art teacher also helped me enroll at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) for a summer course in figure drawing. I was taking the course with college students and though I was initially intimidated by the older students and the situation drawing a nude person for the first time I fell in love with this specific type of drawing. The drawing seen here was from a short gestural warm up before longer poses by the model.

[kevinhoth]

25 Years Ago - my first photography class.

It recently dawned on me that my first photography class was 25 years ago. This seems like a good time to look back and consider all of the projects and turns that I’ve come through. I hope this will inform a deeper reading of my work at this point, but also serve as inspiration and guidance for others.

My last semester of college was one where I was trying to fill in all the necessary art classes to finish with an Art Major. I had been passionate about Anatomy and Physiology since it became my favorite high school class. I had thought about doing Art Therapy but at the time there were no programs available at UW - Madison and I didn’t want to transfer colleges. So I did all the prereqs for Occupational Therapy (Calculus, Biology, Zoology, etc.) which I thought would be more creative then being a Physical Therapist and less extensive schooling than being a Doctor.

I had studied abroad in Spain my junior year so while I was away I was taking a correspondence course in Abnormal Psychology. This was my last prerequisite to get into the OT program so it needed to be completed before the summer. I aced the class and was accepted into the OT program. When I came back to the states I was living at our family cabin in northern Wisconsin. I volunteered at the local hospital to get a feel for what the average OT’s day was like. One of the cases I ran into was a woman whose hand had been accidentally cut by her husband while he was chainsawing in the yard. The woman had approached her husband while he was sawing and when she tried to speak to him he wheeled around not knowing she was right behind him. So the OT’s job was to help with range of motion and help free up some of the scar tissue. The whole experience of being in this arena depressed me and I thought “there is no way I want to be doing this as a job!”

I very nervously told my parents that I would be finishing my college studies with an Art Major rather than the OT specialization. They were not happy! In any case, one of my last courses was my first experience in the black and white darkroom. I learned to develop my own film and to print silver gelatin prints. My teacher was a humorous man who was itching to retire to New Mexico where he was originally from. His name was Cavalierre Ketchum, which seemed like a very Southwestern name. He showed us how you could fill in scratches on your negatives by rubbing your finger on the side of your nose and then filling the scratch in with nose grease. He also showed us how to remove dust from the negative by lightly brushing a small brush behind your ear so that it had a different charge then the negative. You would then be able to simply touch the negative where the dust was and it would leap off onto the brush. Pretty esoteric and unusual.

Anyway the photo shown here is one of the only images that appeals to me from this semester. I didn’t really know what subject matter to choose so I used myself. Though it is out of focus, I like the self portrait for the feel of inquiry it has. It seems to say “hmm, I wonder where I could take this?”

The second photo was taken when my three roommates and I decided very spontaneously to drive to Washington, DC on a thursday afternoon to surprise visit one of our girlfriends. None of us had class on Fridays so we drove through the night and then turned back around on Sunday to make it back for classes on Monday. 

This photo is significant to me because it shows my way of thinking and my desire to be irreverent.  

[kevinhoth]

25 years in - Restart, refresh, is this thing on?

I haven’t been on here in years but I’ve felt the need to do some writing about photography and my development as an artist. This may or may not be of interest to others but it helps me sort it all out. I recently realized my first photo class was 25 years ago so this seemed like a good time to reflect on my photo-making career.