Jeffrey Hoone first discovered his interest in photography in high school, in a small dark room belonging to a friend’s brother. As he watched a white piece of paper fade into a photograph under a negative light, Hoone was hooked.

“I thought it was magic,” he said.

Decades later, Hoone still lives in Syracuse. Today, he’s running Light Work, a photography gallery and lab located in the Robert B. Menschel Media Center at Syracuse University, where he’s been the director since 1982.

During his tenure, Hoone has led the gallery to warrant international acclaim and has helped launch the careers of famed photographers like Andres Serrano and Cindy Sherman.

But Hoone’s work goes far beyond just the gallery — some of his greatest influences occur on young, emerging artists. Hoone’s drive to help less visible artists stems from when he was a young photographer attending the San Francisco Art Institute as an undergraduate. During his time there, Hoone founded a nonprofit arts organization called Xpress Art Center. Its inaugural gallery space was Hoone’s own loft-home, where he said he tried to showcase other artists whose work wasn’t being noticed by established institutions.

“I was really interested in the idea of supporting artists outside the mainstream,” Hoone said.

After Hoone left California to return to Syracuse in 1979, he began to use the Light Work lab — which was established just a few years before — for his own work. Hoone eventually got to know the founders and original co-directors of the organization, Phil Block and Tom Bryan. When Block took a year off in 1980 to study bookbinding in England, Hoone applied for the position of director.

Hoone said his position has felt less like a job and more like a lifestyle he has chosen to adopt.

“Artists are artists because they really have to be,” he said. “There’s something about them that compels them to explore things.”

For the last 36 years, Hoone has been helping artists grow through Light Work’s highly competitive Artist-in-Residence Program. The residency program, which offers recipients a $5,000 stipend to produce work, is incredibly competitive — last year, Hoone said there were more than 900 applicants for 12 available grants.

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“It’s more competitive than Harvard,” said Hoone with a laugh.

Mary Lee Hodgens, the associate director of Light Work, said she believes the lucrative nature of the Artist-in-Residence Program is due in part to the freedom it offers recipients. Artists who are awarded the grant are not required to do anything specific with it other than pursue their personal projects, something that Hodgens describes as “unusual in the art world.”

Hodgens joined the Light Work team in 1995 as an administrative assistant. She said she was struck by Hoone’s devotion to the goals he wanted to accomplish at Light Work.

“It’s very easy for an organization like Light Work to get off track, but he is the person that always brings everybody back to the core mission of supporting emerging and underrecognized artists,” Hodgens said.

Hoone has, for the most part, stopped producing his own photography, focusing instead on his directorial role. He said this is in part because of the difficulty of switching hats — to him, it feels odd to one moment be advocating other artists’ work and the next be advocating his own. Supporting other artists’ careers is what Hoone said has led him to remain at Light Work for nearly forty years.

“You can really make a difference in their lives,” Hoone said. “When you have somebody like an artist tell you that you’ve changed their life, I don’t know if it gets any better than that.”

Doug DuBois, a member of the Photo Faculty at Light Work, said Hoone has been a mentor for him during the 20 years they have known each other. DuBois also teaches as an associate professor of art photography at SU and said Hoone has served as an unofficial advisor for many of DuBois’ students, emerging photographers themselves.

“Light Work is, quite frankly, a critical and unique facet of the photography program at VPA,” DuBois said.

During the past 15 years, Hoone has taken on a much larger role within the university. He now oversees all of the art galleries on campus, as well as the Louise and Bernard Palitz Gallery in New York City and the Photography and Literacy Project. Though the increased responsibility is added work, Hoone didn’t express any desire to leave Light Work.

“I don’t have a clear picture of it in my head,” he said. “There’s still things I’m doing that I’m enjoying.”

The first time leaving Light Work ever crossed Hoone’s mind, he said, was after the gallery was awarded the New York State Governor’s Art Award in 1989. A large and prestigious grant, the art award was also offered to musician Miles Davis and dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov the same year. After Light Work became a recipient, Hoone said people began to ask him: “What do you plan to do next?”

“The more I thought about it, the more I thought: I have the best job,” Hoone said. “I don’t want anybody else’s job in the art world or the photography world. I want to keep doing this and making it better and better.”

Published on November 25, 2018 at 9:43 pm