Cherie Hiser - Part Two, Photographer

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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Cherie Hiser - Part One, Center of the Eye

Oregon-born Cherie Hiser’s name has come up countless times during my research into Colorado’s photo history. Her Center of the Eye (COE) workshop program, which she founded in Aspen in 1968, had a profound effect on photo education in the country and introduced countless photo teachers and students to the State.

Summer workshops up to then tended to be intensive retreats for serious hobbyists led by mid-century superstar photographers—Ansel Adams in Yosemite, for instance, or Ruth Bernhard in the Bay Area. In contrast, Hiser developed a hybrid workshop/school with a counter-cultural learning philosophy that embraced traditional fine art practice, contemporary trends, free-wheeling experimentation and, to sweeten the pot, college accreditation for students needing a few inter-term credits.

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Cherie Hiser Green: Lee Friedlander was one of our star faculty people. (Double portrait of Lee Freidlander.) Cherie Hiser Green/COE Archive/Alex Sweetman.

The COE office and darkrooms were located in the basement of the Hotel Jerome on Main Street, with most classes happening outdoors in Aspen and the surrounding areas. During its brief five-year existence (1968–73) more than a thousand people of all ages participated in basic-to-advanced, formal-to-chaotic instruction on subjects as diverse as science, photojournalism, film, and art. Hiser’s innovations were so effective that it inspired internationally-renowned programs as far flung as Maine, Sun Valley, Santa Fe, and Aspen’s Anderson Ranch.

Cherie Hiser grew up in Portland, Oregon. Her personal introduction to photography began in 1963 when she took a workshop with Minor White at the Portland Art Museum. In 1965, she left Oregon in search of a semi-bohemian lifestyle in the Colorado Rockies. She arrived with two objectives: to ski (for income and recreation) and to take lessons from Denver photographer Arnold Gassan, who had been recommended to her by White, their mutual acquaintance.

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Photographer unknown: Cherie Hiser in the COE office, Hotel Jerome, Aspen, 1968 or 69. COE Archive/Alex Sweetman.

When she arrived Gassan was out of town and, with no other contacts to lean on, her plans evaporated and she returned home. Back in Oregon she connected with Aspen’s most prominent photographer, Ferenc Berko, who helped set her up for a visit the following year. She returned in 1966, settled in Aspen, and worked as a ski instructor. She also met her future husband, David, who was chief photographer for the Aspen Illustrated News.

David was keen to give the job up, so when they married Cherie gladly took it over. She was especially suited to photographing Aspen’s milieu of artists, celebrities, and personalities. Writer Mary Ann Lynch describes her then as a “sexy, charismatic, and smart young woman in miniskirts, [an] edge walker, a thinker divinely creatively irreverent, tending toward chaos but always able to make things happen.” [CameraArts, February/March 2006, 31-37].

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David Hiser: Cherie Hiser and Dale Raising in front of Center of the Eye office, Aspen, 1970. © 2012 David Hiser

Hiser’s charismatic verve was rewarded one evening when a random dinner conversation sparked the idea of establishing a photo school in Aspen. Soon after, she met Jerry Uelsmann, Eugene Smith, Todd Walker, and Nathan Lyons at an SPE meeting in Denver and invited them all to teach in Aspen the following year. As she recalled when we met at her home in 2016, “that was the beginning of it. … A man called Jimmy Smith gave me $500. I bought one enlarger and that’s how I started, with one enlarger.”

Conversations with Jill Uris, Cherie’s “Girl Friday” in Aspen, illuminate Cherie’s high-wire approach to business and life. In January 1969, for instance, she and Cherie went on a COE fundraising trip east to Minneapolis, Washington DC, New York, and Boston.

In just three days they visited with John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, saw New York Times writer Jacob Deschin, dropped by the offices of Popular Photography, visited Michael Hoffman at Aperture, and finished the trip by staying the night with Minor White. (People were accessible then!)

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Doug Rhinehart: Center of the Eye workshop with Arnold Gassan, Ashcroft, Colorado, 1969. Doug Rhinehart/COE Archive/Alex Sweetman.

Hiser added academic muscle to her program by setting up reciprocal agreements with Colorado Mountain College (CMC), Charlie Roitz at CU Boulder, and most importantly Nathan Lyons at the Visual Studies Workshop (VSW). His internship program provided CoE with a roster of highly motivated, inexpensive teachers and assistants (Gary Metz, David Freund, Ellen Manchester) while in turn enticed a steady stream of COE students to enter VSW’s graduate program in Rochester.

The Center’s second year, 1969, Hiser introduced a series of three-day seminars led by “master” photographers: Jerry Uelsmann, Paul Caponigro, Bruce Davidson, and Cornell Capa, founder and former president of the Magnum photo agency.

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Barbara Jo Revelle: "The Figure in the Landscape" class at COE, Aspen, 1972. Teachers: Jack Welpott and Judy Dater. Barbara Jo Revelle/COE Archive/Alex Sweetman.

Writing “1969” reminds me that we are in the Woodstock era, when free love and promiscuity were in the air. Nude photography workshops—and nudity in general—were commonplace.

Jane Reed, now a writer and curator living in San Francisco, remembers that despite all the fun and craziness that year, her experience was also “very intense and very serious. You would get up at six in the morning and go off with your group—your class—and shoot a couple of rolls of film, go back to the darkroom, develop, wait for the prints to dry, make contact sheets, make a sequence in the afternoon and have a review in the evening. It was work. And then other times you’d go off and photograph on your own wherever you chose.”

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Peter de Lory: Aspen 1969. (After Paul Strand. Ellen Manchester and Alex Sweetman standing in the doorway, others unknown.) Courtesy of the artist.

As David recalls, Cherie was more successful at raising money than in managing it, which caused a near-rebellion of the trustees during COE’s second summer season. Its instigator, Arnold Gassan, resigned but it was undeniable that, as David put it, “Cherie was a terrible businessperson. She had no training and she kept going broke. At some point, the IRS actually came down and padlocked the door.”

Hiser’s long-held dream of a permanent home for the Center came to fruition in 1972 when she signed a creative partnership with Paul Soldner’s ceramics school at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass, about ten miles west of Aspen. Soldner renamed his program “Center of the Hand” in honor of Center of the Eye.

But despite a successful first summer at the Ranch, 1973, Hiser had become increasingly disenchanted with her situation. With the benefit of a recommendation from Ansel Adams, she left in the fall to start a photo program at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts.*

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Alex Sweetman: Center of the Eye, Aspen, CO., 1972. (Peter de Lory, second from left. Others unknown.) Showing the cover version for Alex Sweetman’s definitive history of COE titled Center of the Eye: An historical account, Aspen Center for the Visual Arts, 1983. COE Archive/Alex Sweetman.

Cherie left Idaho in 1976 and began a second Center of the Eye in Santa Fe, but the endeavor ended quickly and she moved back to Oregon permanently. Nonetheless, her move away from Anderson Ranch enabled her to refocus her lens as well as her life. Part Two of this profile will focus on her personal photography, from selfies in Aspen to subcultures in Oregon.

* Cherie’s place at Sun Valley was taken by Peter de Lory, who served as director of photography from 1976-79. Peter notes that this summer, Sun Valley Art Center is celebrating its 50th anniversary with an exhibition of works by 25+ former workshop teachers.

My thanks to Alex Sweetman and Paula Gillen for their help in gathering images and information about Center of the Eye. As always, thanks for reading and please subscribe, leave a comment, and/or add a suggestion. You can also follow Colorado Photo History on Instagram.