As her work evolved, her gaze narrowed, shifting from the world outside to consider what lies within. In the 1970s, while living in London, she persuaded her subjects to let her into their homes and came back from her visits with disarming portraits that are at once intimate and a little standoffish. In the 1980s, she got closer to her subjects, focusing in on the details of individual bodies (the armpit, the nape of the neck, that spot where the foot and ankle converge). Later in that same decade, flirting with abstraction, she transformed casually scrawled notes and grocery lists into stark images that might have been made by a Chinese calligrapher working with a Pilot pen. By the 1990s, she came up with a series of digital prints of tissue paper saturated with a variety of organic substances.
Driven to see into the heart of things, she had moved over the decades from social observation to something more intimate and, at the same time, abstract. At the same time, Hellebrand began another exploration, one that began with an interest in spirituality, meditation, and tai chi and eventually led her to Sufism. Her latest work—color pictures, photographed and printed digitally, of trees, clouds, and water—speaks directly to that journey, delving into realms seemingly beyond the reach of the naturalistic strictures of conventional photography. As she puts it, “I want to photograph that which is purely energetic, which is beyond all that we see. Perhaps it can’t actually be photographed, but the process of trying to do so is rich and deep. Best of all, my photography and my spiritual practice become one in my desire to ‘see.’… Traveling from the physical to the non-physical is now my mode from shooting the photograph to final print. I am only interested in abstracting. Describing is not my domain anymore.”
The Purist Years
Through most of her career, though, Hellebrand has been devoted to “straight photography,” remaining a strict constructionist even as her deepening spiritual life challenged the medium’s traditional just-the-facts-ma’am ethic. For more than 20 years, as her work dug its way deeper into abstraction, she hewed to the party line: no cropping and no fancy darkroom tricks.
During that time, Hellebrand’s aesthetic was austere—as though true intimacy could be achieved only through restraint and formality. The content may be all over the place—a plain-faced woman, sweater slightly askew, standing proudly at the center of her modest London flat; the palm of a hand stretched taut; words, printed backwards and thus rendered indecipherable; a crumpled-up Kleenex—but the sensibility is singular. There’s a gravity in the presentation of all this work that serves as a connecting thread that stitches one series to the next and assures you that, yes, indeed, all this work springs from the same source.The early work is black-and-white, certainly not an unusual aesthetic decision for a straight photographer, but, with Hellebrand, you get the sense that there’s more to it than simple acquiescence to the conventions of the medium. The soul of these pictures is black-and-white: they are stark and uncompromising. To imagine the intrusion of color into the scene—were those drapes green? That pantsuit mauve? The ink red?—simply won’t do. The power of these images—their beauty—lies in their asceticism.
Then, too, in much of this early work, Hellebrand seems always to be paring down the composition to its bare bones. From the first, documentary work to the handwriting pictures, you catch her employing, with some frequency, a frontal compositional strategy that places her subject square in the center of the image—as if in a formal presentation, an official state portrait or a traditional wedding portrait.
Elsewhere, she favors an off-center view that can verge on the ungainly. Breaking just about every rule in the Photo I composition book, some of these early pictures can look almost accidental, as though Hellebrand had stumbled on to something so compelling she didn’t have the time to “compose” either herself or the image. Achingly awkward, these pictures echo those moments when something anonymous, seemingly inconsequential—a hand, a neck, a letter—moves from the periphery of your vision to centerstage. Think of those times, sitting on the crosstown bus or standing on line at Home Depot, when you become fixated on some odd detail of the complete stranger before you—when the shape of his ear or the downy hair on her neck transfixes you—and you’ll get the idea.For all their severity, all of Hellebrand’s early photographs are about the intimacy of seeing: the hand, the face, the word “neg” thrust front and center. The sometimes awkward quality of both the discomfitingly confrontational images and the seemingly caught-on-the-fly ones leads the viewer into a deeper consideration of what is depicted. Throwing you a little off balance, they draw you in as if daring you to see.
Discovering color
Now, after decades of microscopy, Hellebrand has flung open the doors and ventured outside, turning her sights on the natural world. Her work since the late 1990s has been absorbed by scenes from nature although, with her characteristic intensity, she’s focused not on the scenery but rather on the details. Her field of vision is consumed by the tree’s branches, not the tree entire, by the breaking wave, not the larger seascape.
And as ever, she makes you work for the payoff: the same rigor that distinguished all her earlier work is present in these open-air images, as is the same meditative quality. But even as she holds true to her fundamental aesthetic—one dedicated to introspection, silence, austerity—she cuts loose in these new pictures.
For Hellebrand has discovered color, and that discovery has transformed her photography. The impact of a simple shift from the monochromatic to the full spectrum leaves you reeling: it’s like walking out of a darkened house into a brilliant summer’s day. Where the intensity of the earlier imagery could feel claustrophobic at times, the opening-out of the current work suggests a looseness and generosity that invites you to enter in.
Color made its first public appearance in Hellebrand’s work with her Wind and Branches series (1997). Like the handwriting images, these photographs bring you uncomfortably close to the subject. With twigs and branches blocking your path all the way, you have to blaze a trail through this landscape. As you hack your way through the brush, you’re forced to look at the trees and foliage right in front of you. But even as you scrutinize them, the branches tremble in the passing wind and you lose clear sight of them as they blur and shimmer out of focus. Confronting you with the physical world all around you, Hellebrand is pushing you to see beyond the merely corporeal. 
Likewise, her next series, titled simply Waves, reads less as descriptive landscape and more as a springboard for spiritual contemplation. With their blurred motion, subdued palette, and minimalist compositions, these images speak simultaneously about the ocean’s tangible physical presence and the impalpable energy that animates it.But Hellebrand’s most recent work, also color, strikes a different note from virtually everything that has come before—even the pictures of trees and waves that led up to it. In these images of clouds and streams, the gravity—the austerity—has lifted, leaving behind images that are, in the former set, luminous, untethered, light as air and, in the latter, specular and playful. This time around, Hellebrand, enraptured by light and color, slips a little hedonism into the proceedings.
Like Mark Rothko in one of his more upbeat moods, she saturates her pictures with heightened colors, at times pushing them to the edge of dissonance. The color combinations are sometimes startling: electric yellow clouds against a cyan-colored sky; brassy coral against slate green; purplish gray against a field of color that shifts from butterscotch to the palest blue; a muted blue smudge on a faint rose. Like Rothko, too, Hellebrand has her somber moments, with inky blue or black clouds floating across the picture plane in several of the cloud pictures. Some images even take a Turneresque turn: in one, the churning clouds suggest a vortex, with darkening thunderheads swooping down on low-lying clouds still stained delicate gold and pink. That kind of dynamism gets even more play in the Streams series. Here, the colors tend to be more muted—blues and grays with undertones of reds, greens, yellows—but they dance across and around the picture plane in a near frenzy of motion.
Digital metaphysics
Loosely speaking, I suppose, you’d have to categorize these pictures as landscapes. Another chronicler of the skies, John Constable, staked out similar turf when he climbed up Hampstead Heath for his marathon production of cloud studies in 1821. Those pictures, too, are hard to classify: are they finished paintings? Or merely preparatory sketches for one of the large-scale landscapes? Something in the subject itself seems to force the question: what are these people doing, making pictures of clouds—of ephemera?
Constable’s cloud studies, Romantic though they may have been in spirit, are relentlessly descriptive: on the back of each of these sketches, he carefully noted the time of day and the prevailing weather conditions when each was painted. Hellebrand makes no such effort to describe, to illustrate but, rather, flirts outrageously with abstraction. Uprooted from the particulars of time and place, her rushing streams are thoroughly anonymous; her feathery clouds could be anywhere in the world where rain falls and clouds form. It’s not accuracy Hellebrand is after but, as she puts it, “depth via transformation.”It’s not simply the indeterminate location that sets these photographs loose from their moorings. The very technique Hellebrand employs in constructing them serves to destabilize these images: the aggressive pixilation undermines the substantiality of an already insubstantial subject. Her latter-day pointillism compromises the quiddity of the subjects—their “thingness”—until the physical world itself seems about to dissolve. From a distance, each photograph resolves into a readily understandable image, but as you come nearer, it begins to disintegrate: the clouds stop looking like clouds exactly and more like a brilliant array of dots. The illusion that the photograph has any subject at all begins to fall away.
But the fun doesn’t end there because, once you’ve passed the point where the image has broken down into a collection of dots, something altogether more metaphysical kicks in: you begin to notice that the pixels themselves suggest something fundamentally physical—as though they were describing the subject at the atomic level.
On the one hand, the digitization breaks down the integrity of the image—or, rather, the illusion of the integrity of the image. All those pixels underscore the notion that the subject under consideration isn’t really there—it’s just a trick of the digital printer. But the very means of dissolution—the dots of color—point at a deeper reality: these clouds break down, but they break down into something elementary, with the pixels representing that which underlies the physical world.
The Photographic Meditation
Any consideration of Hellebrand’s work must acknowledge the centrality of spirituality to her life and work. Seen from that perspective, the narrowing of focus over the course of her career might be better described as a deepening. She writes, “It is no longer the ‘thing itself’ which inspires me to photograph, but that aspect of experience which is beneath vision, physical touch, or descriptive language.”
In turning her attention to the skies, Hellebrand has joined a long line of artists—most of them painters—who set out to free picture-making from the tyranny of base matter. Rothko and Turner come to mind, of course, as do the early 19th-century German Romanticist Caspar David Freidrich and American Luminists like Martin Johnson Heade and Fitz Hugh Lane.
The camera, however, is not a paintbrush. It’s one thing for a painter to banish the material world from his canvas. But if you think about it, a photographer who is no longer engaged by “the thing itself,” who adopts an air of insouciance toward what is before the lens might find herself in a professional quandary. Conventional photography is, at core, a very clever application of physics: physical particles of light reflect off physical surfaces, make their way—via the agency of a lens—to a physical sheet of chemically sensitized film, and there leave their physical mark. In the darkroom, the entire process gets repeated to create the final image—itself a physical object.
In this veritable orgy of materiality, how to photograph that which is beneath vision, beyond touch—that which is immaterial?
Hellebrand’s output, at least since the 1980s, has represented a sustained effort to devise answers to that question—answers that bend, perhaps inevitably, toward abstraction. Her work proposes a kind of transcendental seeing and intimates that, yes, you can see into the essence of things. As a photographer, she has no choice but to record the concrete, but for Hellebrand the object before her lens points to what lies beyond the limits of experience. And the rigor—the relentless quality of so much of her earlier work—has enabled her to wrest something transcendent from the merely concrete. The extreme close-ups shove your nose right into the cracks and crevices of another’s body—the parts you don’t look at, the parts you normally don’t bother to see. The handwriting images move in even closer on their subject, cutting the words loose to float across the picture plane like so many Zen koans. If possible, the tissue paper series is even more unreadable, with the paper forming hills and valleys in an anonymous, affectless landscape.
But the literal-mindedness of the analog process left her at the mercy of “the thing itself,” of that latent image trapped by the laws of physics onto the film’s surface. With the black-and-white work, her strategy was one of extreme focus, of exacting definition. She zoomed in so closely on her subjects that the smallest detail became monumental, achieving abstraction through microscopic description. The results, while full of integrity, could be a tad intimidating: as though you were being asked to participate in a particularly arduous spiritual discipline—a marathon walking meditation or a vow of silence.
Going digital has freed Hellebrand up to do whatever she wants to with “reality.” As she puts it, “I can take liberties with digitally captured information that were never possible, or even desirable, with conventional film and prints. I can use content as raw material rather than as stated fact.”
Of course, from your first glimpse of her digital pictures, you understand perfectly that they’re not intended as literal images of specific clouds or illustrations of particular streams. But rather than narrowing down her field of vision—as she did in, say, the handwriting series—Hellebrand has opened up and let the sunlight come pouring in. In a curious paradox, she leads you to the same place—of abstraction, transcendence, silence—but now her tone is far more seductive, less severe.
Come to think of it, though, it’s not that Hellebrand has abandoned austerity but rather that she’s embraced her inner voluptuary. In pulling off the rather neat trick of reconciling the ascetic and the sensualist, she’s created a group of photographs that promise an intimate encounter with the transcendent. For the earthbound among us, that can be a rather daunting prospect—like enlisting for a lifetime hitch in the hermitage.
The thing is, the vision she presents in these latest pictures is so ravishingly beautiful—so full of life and sheer pleasure—that you’re almost tempted to sign up.
