Why should a black-and-white photograph be trusted? John Hilliard has been asking versions of that question since the mid-1960s, in pictures and, just as persistently, in prose. Written Down / Written Up gathers the prose.

The texts collected here span roughly sixty years, from the mid-1960s to 2025. Some were published as essays and reviews; others survive as notes, and a number appear in print for the first time. Their preoccupations are consistent: the assumed accuracy of the black-and-white image; the way certain art forms impose particular visual hierarchies, and what can be learned by inverting them; and the arrangement by which image and text act at once as accomplices and opponents, each amplifying or destabilising the other’s capacity to make meaning. Hilliard writes as an artist thinking through problems he has also posed in his own work, which keeps the tone exact and unmystical.

Duncan Wooldridge edits the collection and contributes an introduction and contextualising texts, setting the arguments against the practice from which they emerged. The volume is extensively illustrated, so the writing can be read beside the images it addresses rather than at a remove from them.

MACK describes this as the first comprehensive collection of Hilliard’s writing, and the claim rests on scope rather than rhetoric: previously unpublished material, notes, essays and reviews placed in a single sequence. For a collector, the interest lies in that concentration. Hilliard’s criticism has circulated in exhibition catalogues, journals and occasional publications; having it assembled across 320 pages, with Wooldridge’s editorial apparatus, makes the development of his thinking legible in a way that scattered reading does not.

The book is a paperback with flap, 15 x 21 cm, published in September 2026 — modest in format, substantial in content. It is best read alongside the work it discusses.