Part Two of our Cherie Hiser profile concentrates on her personal work with the camera. When she settled in Aspen in 1966, Cherie was a promising photographer who’d taken workshops with Minor White, Imogen Cunningham, and Ruth Bernhard at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. In 1967 she married David Hiser, chief photographer for the Aspen Illustrated News; Cherie took over his job, which was largely focused on documenting the town’s milieu of skiers and celebrities. She did this and also taught workshops with David until she declared herself as a “photo-evangelist” (to borrow a phrase from Lee Friedlander) by opening the Center of the Eye (COE) workshop program in 1968.
Self-portrait with Paul Newman. Aspen, CO. 1968. “Dear Jim- We heard about the reunion--are we invited? love c+p xx.” Photograph by Cherie Hiser. Collection of COE Archive/Alex Sweetman
For the next decade or so, Cherie perfected the art of the selfie as a means to chronicle her life. (It’s worth noting that taking selfies then involved holding a heavy 35mm camera at arm’s length, something she did with amazing dexterity and skill.)
I was fortunate to interview her at her home in June 2017. At the time, my interest was focused on her experiences at COE and we talked more about other people’s imagery than her own. Fortunately, the following year I visited a Tucson used-magazine store and found an old issue of Camera Arts in which Mary Ann Lynch discusses Hiser’s personal photography. In a revealing comment, Hiser describes her self-portraits as being like a landscape, with her face as a place populated by people and objects.
Annie and Sandy, 1968. Self-portrait by Cherie Hiser. Collection of COE archive/Alex Sweetman.
One defining image in that genre was her “Little Orphan Annie” selfie. Hiser explained to Lynch that she went to a local hair salon with the photographer Bea Nettles to get her first perm: “I said, ‘Look at me, I could be Little Orphan Annie,’ as I sat down with my dog, put the bottle caps over my eyes, and photographed.” Meanwhile Nettles used a plastic Diana camera to photograph Hiser photographing. [1] But it is not just the likeness that makes the photo; it reverberates with light and symmetry, with gleaming teeth, radiant eyes, and upraised faces apropos of some B-movie visitation from space.
Left, Xmas Card, ca. 1980; Right, Mental Patient, Portland, ca. early 1980s. Photographs by Cherie Hiser. Collection of COE Archive/Alex Sweetman.
Hiser was not afraid to expose her private self to the camera. One humorous self-portrait, made for a Christmas card, depicts her seated with three very pregnant friends standing behind. The women are all naked; Hiser—wryly self-aware and evidently not pregnant—holds a doll on her lap in an ironic gesture of solidarity, defiance, or wistful acceptance of her own aging childlessness.
COE Students taking selfies. Photograph by Cherie Hiser. Collection of COE archive/Alex Sweetman.
By including herself in the picture so often she was sometimes criticized as being outrageously egocentric. Away from Aspen’s heady milieu, however, her vision shifted from self-involvement to a celebration of other iconoclasts—most vividly people who existed on society’s fringes. Odyssey of the Invisible, a series she began in the late-seventies and photographed in black-and-white using a 35mm camera, comprises four discreet subjects: people with tattoos; hospitalized mental patients; a community of young gay men in Santa Fe; and aging among herself and her friends.
During an appearance at Anderson Ranch in 1982, Hiser told Mary Hayes of The Aspen Times that, “The hardest part is finding what you want to do. I learned my craft as a photographer, but it was the series about gays [made between 1976–77] that began to lead me down [a path of] photographing unique people. … [My subjects] are regular folks, from all walks of life. They are grandmothers, engineers, clerks in stores. So I’m making visible the invisible; making ordinary the unordinary.” [2]
Top and Right, Masa diptych, 1979; Below: Self Portrait with Former Husband 1968/1988. Photographs by Cherie Hiser Green. Collection of COE archive/Alex Sweetman.
David Hiser and Cherie Hiser Green - Through the Years. Photograph by Liz Major for Aspen magazine. Collection of COE archive/Alex Sweetman.
Her protagonists, Randolph Osman writes, are revealed “as complex, multidimensional personalities leading two separate and perhaps conflicting lives [whose] enforced dualism are hallmarks of our time in history.” [3] The tattoo section of the Odyssey series, titled “Letters to Pepper” (named for tattoo artist Don Nolan’s son) shows each subject twice—clothed and naked. One example shows Masa, a Japanese man dressed in a business suit in the back of a taxicab. Clothed he appears totally unadorned; unclothed we see him completely covered in tattoos from the neck down.
Even with its disturbing subtext of domestic abuse, an anomaly such as her portrait of a couple in a Rochester bar displays the same open-hearted affinity that permeates all of Hiser’s work, yet also hints at the insights she gained from working in the mental health arena. Back in 1963, she had graduated with a degree in psychology; after she returned to Portland in 1978 she worked in hospital psychiatric wards as a mental health therapist and later as a Psychiatric Assessment Specialist.
Couple in bar, Rochester, NY, 1972. Photograph by Cherie Hiser. Collection of COE archive/Alex Sweetman.
Her photographic accomplishments in Portland include a so-called “god-child of COE” in the form of PhotoWorks NorthWest, a non-profit community darkroom, gallery, and meeting space she founded in 1994. She was also a founding member of Photo Americas (now PhotoLucida), which today hosts one the country’s most respected photo reviews. She also taught in classrooms and workshops, and was active throughout the photo community until 2001, when she was diagnosed with a neurological disorder. [4]
Her diagnosis forced her to retire from her psychiatric career and reduce her photographic activities to the point that when we met for our interview in 2017, she was confined to her bed at home. It was my birthday, and in retrospect I think of our meeting as having been a generous gift from her to me.
Cherie passed away in 2019. Her archive is housed with CU Boulder School of Art professor Alex Sweetman, who was active as a student, volunteer, and teacher at COE from its first to last days. My thanks go out to Alex and his wife, Paula Gillen, for their help with this project.
Psychic healer - Las Vegas, nd. Photograph by Cherie Hiser. Collection of COE Archive/Alex Sweetman.
Endnotes:
1. Mary Ann Lynch, “Cherie Hiser: The Fabric of her Life and Times, Camera Arts, February/March 2006. 30-37.
2. Mary Eshbaugh Hayes, The Aspen Times, August 12, 1982. 3. Cited in Sweetman, Center of the Eye, 25. All Hayes quotes from this source.
3. Randolph Osman, “Cherie Hiser’s Odyssey of the Invisible,” Northwest Photo Network, December/January 1988/89.
4. Late career information from Lynch and www.photographicimage.com/ArtistBiographies. Lynch writes that as part of her mental health work in Portland she introduced photo therapy as a way of helping acute care patients to communicate. This was a field that her old friend Arnold Gassan also pioneered in the US.
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