Hicks’s work is rooted in observation, memory, and the instability of identity. Working primarily with film and traditional darkroom processes, he uses photography to examine the distance between what is visible and what remains obscured. Figures are often partially hidden, reflected, blurred, or absorbed into their surroundings, allowing the photograph to hold a person’s presence without fully explaining them.
The street is central to Hicks’s practice because it offers moments that are uncontrolled, incomplete, and resistant to certainty. His photographs focus on gestures, interruptions, atmosphere, and the brief relationships created between people, architecture, light, and the camera. Rather than treating the photograph as a definitive record, Hicks approaches it as a fragment of perception, evidence of how a moment was experienced rather than an objective account of what occurred.
Across his books and ongoing projects, themes of isolation, transformation, vulnerability, and selfhood recur. The physical processes of shooting film, developing negatives, and printing in the darkroom are part of that investigation. Grain, haze, contrast, reflection, and imperfection function as more than aesthetic choices. They allow the image to resist complete clarity. Hicks’s photographs occupy a space between documentation and memory, where recognition remains possible, but certainty does not.
Film photography, darkroom printing, photobooks, and street photography.
Draped in Blue and Raging Waters, 2026, ongoing.