Jason Hendardy: On images doing and conditioning

A conversation on the ways images act and condition our perception of reality

Images that circulate widely on social media play a decisive role in shaping how social and political realities are produced, perceived, and contested. Far from being neutral, these images contribute to the formation of cultural and territorial identities, reinforcing dominant narratives while also holding the potential to disrupt, reframe, and resist them.

Within this context, Der Greif “Local Voices” continues to foreground situated perspectives and collaborative authorship as a way of slowing down image circulation and re-embedding images within their social, cultural, and political conditions. Through an ongoing exercise in co-writing, the project examines how visual practices can counter homogenizing narratives and support more plural, democratic forms of representation by insisting on specificity, locality, and dialogue, foregrounding situated knowledge over dominant or centralized narratives.

We’ve invited Jason Hendardy’s to converse about his practice, positioned at the intersection of photography, material culture, and narrative construction, interrogating how everyday images and ordinary objects dictate our perception of reality. Intercepting everything from glitched analog broadcasts to the abandoned material records of found images, Hendardy’s practice interrogates how our identity is constructed by data streams and societal programming. Rather than treating photographs as definitive records, he approaches them as unstable sites of meaning that gain power through context, display, and repetition. Drawing from an eclectic array of influences, ranging from DIY punk culture and commercial packaging to Hito Steyerl’s concept of the "poor image", Hendardy highlights the physical and technological conditions of visual media, allowing noise, low resolution, and physical degradation to become central to the artwork's message.

Jason Hendardy is a Seattle-based multidisciplinary artist born in the SF Bay Area. His practice spans photography, video, sound, and sculpture to examine how personal and cultural narratives are assembled. Work with found material, archives, and constructed forms pushes against the authority of documentation, treating images as unstable objects. He authored “This is a Test” (Gnomic Book, 2024), recognized by the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. His work is held in MoMA, LACMA, and Harvard libraries. Hendardy studied photography and media arts at California College of the Arts and received an MFA in photography from the University of Hartford Art School.

Ilaria Sponda: I'd like to start from a question posed by a term in your own words, "societal images". How does an interest in the image as a societal symbol play out in your practice and in your project "Personal Technologies"?

When I use the term “societal images,” I’m thinking about images that carry cultural associations beyond what they literally depict. Objects can do this too. Something like a household product or a cigarette can point toward broader ideas about aspiration, class, labor, or identity. Those associations are built culturally over time, and they can change. In “Personal Technologies,” I wanted to put those images and objects in conversation with each other so that the photographs could become a starting point for a dialogue. One where the viewer can bring their own associations and expectations to the work, and perhaps reconsider the ordinary things we encounter. I’m less interested in the photograph functioning as either a mirror or a window, and more interested in it as a way into an idea. More broadly, I’m drawn to how people use images, objects, and the ways things are presented to make sense of a world that does not come already explained, and how meaning can shift depending on context and presentation. By resisting the idea that the present is all there is, there’s an opportunity to imagine potential futures. I think one role of an artist is to give ordinary aspects of contemporary life a new form, so we can encounter what we think we already know differently. That is where a lot of my practice begins and what interests me.

IS: What are these "societal images"?

JH: I think of them as the images we see so often that they begin to feel natural, almost like a baseline for how we understand contemporary life. Advertising, family photographs, product packaging, television, internet images, even the way certain objects are photographed and presented. Over time, they settle into the way we picture the world and our place within it. They influence what feels normal, desirable, successful, or expected, often without us being fully aware of it. I’m fascinated by and skeptical of these images that help tell us what a home should look like, how we can fix our lives, or how we are supposed to understand ourselves and other people. Sometimes life's complexities become so reduced that people can feel alienated in this world. In a way, I just want to acknowledge the complexities we all face.

IS: What other visual languages informed the aesthetics and language you employ today?

JH: A lot of it comes from photography and the long lineage of artists who try to play with the medium's boundaries and expectations, including its canon, but also from things outside of photography. I grew up around music and DIY culture, where the image, the design, and the way something was presented all felt connected to the work itself. I’m also equally influenced by things like advertising, instructional photos, and the kinds of images we encounter in everyday life without necessarily thinking of them as art. Hito Steyerl’s idea of the “poor image” has also been something that I’ve carried as an interest for quite some time. I’m intrigued by images that have been degraded, copied, or passed through different technologies, from old videotape and television screens to low-resolution internet images. I like that those images carry signs of how they have moved through the world. Their imperfections become part of their meaning rather than something that needs to be corrected. I think all of those things made me interested in how images can change depending on where they come from, how they are presented, or what they are put next to. That is still a big part of how I work now. I like using different kinds of images together, straight photographs, found images, degraded images, objects, because each one can do something slightly different.

IS: How do images, memories, and objects form identity through accumulation and change?

JH: Identity gets built slowly through accumulation. Images, memories, and objects collect around us over time, and we start to understand ourselves through them. They can hold personal meaning, but they also carry cultural associations from outside ourselves. None of those meanings stay fixed. Memories change, objects can come to mean something different as they move through lives, and images can take on new meanings depending on when and how we encounter them. Identity feels like something that keeps getting revised through what we keep, what we forget, what we inherit, and what we choose to pay attention to. That's part of why I’m drawn to ordinary objects and common images. They can seem insignificant on their own, but together they can start to build a larger picture of how we understand the world around us.

IS: How is your current research "NFS" developing?

JH: “NFS” has developed a good deal from where it started. I’ve made photographs and assemblages in well over a hundred estate sales across Washington State. I began by photographing them because I was interested in the strange moment when a private home becomes public and the objects that made up someone’s life become available to strangers. As I kept working, I became less interested in the estate sale as the subject on its own and noticed how visitors have this need and compulsion to create a story or try to understand who the person who once owned the house was. It’s been a way of looking at a culture through what has been left behind and the stories people create around the site, but it has also given me a way to look at myself and think about my own place within that culture. The project uses several different forms of images, including straight photographs, assemblages, object typologies, and enlarged estate sale tags. Each one creates a different relationship to the original site and lets me approach the same questions from another direction. I'm drawn to how objects and photographs change as they move away from their original context, and how quickly we begin to create stories from incomplete information. For me, NFS is less about the estate sales themselves and more about the ways we orient ourselves in an ambiguous world. We are constantly using images, objects, memories, and cultural associations to fill in what we do not know. The estate sale gives me a concentrated place to look at that process.

IS: I'm interested in how you treat Hi8 video stills as conditions rather than aesthetic choices. Can you expand on this?

JH: I use the Hi8 stills less as a style and more as a condition of how the image exists. The tape, camera, television screen, and the process of pulling a still from moving footage all affect what the image can be. The visual noise, softness, color shifts, and loss of information come from that process. A lot of the Hi8 stills in my book “This is a Test” are from tapes I made as a child. The television screen was one of the things that helped sell an idea of the West to my parents before they each immigrated from Indonesia to the United States. At the same time, that same screen showed us how different our family was from the version of American life being presented. Using those Hi8 tapes became a way of putting my own family back onto the screen in response. That's part of why I see the material quality of Hi8 images as more than an aesthetic choice. Technology carries its own history and relationship to memory and representation, and I like letting those conditions stay visible because they are part of what the image means.

IS: I saw your list of read books and was curious to ask: what about science fiction?

JH: I’ve only begun reading science fiction within the last few years. I love the world building and the possibilities that writers like William Gibson or Philip K. Dick create in books like “Neuromancer” and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” What interests me is how those books take something recognizable about the present and push it far enough that you can see it differently. They exaggerate certain systems, technologies, or social behaviors, but they still feel connected to the world we already live in. I also wonder how many nerdy tech CEOs read these stories when they were younger and were influenced by them enough to try to bring parts of those twisted depictions of reality into the world. There is something strange about science fiction becoming a kind of blueprint for the future, especially when some of those futures were meant as warnings or critiques. And now here we are.

IS: How do you navigate between found footage and newly produced images?

JH: Early on when I was in college, I heard Larry Sultan talk about how much of photography is about how we use images. That idea really stayed with me and shaped how I incorporate found images or footage alongside newly produced images. I don’t really see a hard separation between the two. I’m drawn to what each image can do and what happens when they are put in conversation with each other. A found image or footage already carries a history and a context that I did not create. A new photograph gives me a different kind of control, but it also enters the work with its own set of associations. I like the tension between those two things. Found images can complicate or interrupt a photograph I’ve made, while a new image can give a found image another way to be read. The friction between them can add another layer of meaning, and that shift in context can create a new way of reading an image and then recirculate that reading back into the world.