Ed Hing ’77 Brings His Father’s Past to Light
Think for a moment of a story you’ve heard throughout your life: how your father drove in the winning run in a baseball game, for example, or how your mother traveled to India as a teenager. Hearing these stories, you’ve no doubt taken someone else’s memories and wrapped them in a visual context, imagining the dirt on your father’s uniform, the places your mother had seen. What if you could hold these images in your hand?
With his new series, ‘Self’ Portrait, aka You Look Just Like Your Father, longtime Williston photography teacher Ed Hing ’77 has accomplished precisely that. This summer, Hing spent time with his mother, now 97, “trying to get her to share memories before they disappear,” Hing writes in his artist statement. “One of the things she keeps bringing up is how much she thinks I look like my dad. There are almost no photographs of him in our family albums.”
What resulted from those conversations was a deep dive into AI photo manipulation—a release from “photographic reality,” as Hing puts it, culminating in a set of photos depicting Hing’s father in places Ed had only heard about: at a card table in San Juan, arriving at Ellis Island, and more.
Hing began by entering multiple iterations of AI prompts into the application Midjourney. Once the background images were complete, he took a set of self-portraits, which would serve as his father’s face in the composite photos. For this, Hing attempted to match the quality of the illumination, angle, head position, and shading of the background images he had created using AI. Last, Hing worked extensively in Photoshop to marry the background images with the photos of his own face to create the final composites.
The final series of framed digital prints, on display in the Grubbs Gallery this fall, brings the stories of his father to life, in a way never before possible. “I can feel my father’s presence when looking at the images,” Hing writes.
