PHOTOS

A collection of stills from 1997 to 2006 is now posted on the site.

There are photographs here that have been sitting in boxes — or on drives, or in the back of memory — for nearly thirty years. Some of them were taken on film. Some were made during production. Some were made for no reason other than that someone was in the room, the light was right, and the moment asked to be held.

They are organized by series. Hey Android, As He Fired Up the Drum Machine, Chicks and Dicks, Make-Up, Haunting The Better. Some of those names you may recognize. A few of them are screenplay titles. The photographs aren't illustrations — they preceded the scripts, or ran alongside them, or arrived years later in a different city with a different cast. The connection is temperamental, not narrative. They belong to the same sensibility.

The earliest images in the collection are from 1997. Pittsburgh, mostly. Adrienne and Marritt. Jessica. Maria and Sarah. Jen. People who showed up and let themselves be looked at. I was in my twenties, and I didn't entirely know what I was doing, which is probably why some of the pictures work.

The 2004 work — the Hey Android series in particular — was made in a concentrated burst. Cameron, Rohni, Lamb, Ashandra, Eric, Adrianne. A lot of those sessions have a hothouse quality. When everybody is in the same room, the boundaries between the shoot and the life around it are not particularly clear. That's in the pictures.

There's a self-portrait from 2006 that I've always liked. I'm not sure why I'm including it, except that it's honest.

The collection will be added to over time. There's material from years not represented here — work I'm still deciding about, or still finding. If you've been photographed by me at some point and you want to see what made it in, go look. If something's wrong, tell me.

The Photograph page is live now under Porttfolio

Haunting The Better

Hill Rossin is an Independent writer, director, and producer with three decades of self-directed work across thriller, drama, and dark comedy. His filmmaking career started early; in high school, he took a college film course at Pittsburgh Filmmakers. In the summer of 1992, he shot his first 8mm film — a music video for Sonic Youth's "Sugar Kane," from their then-new album Dirty — for a contest on MTV's 120 Minutes. Although he didn't win, the project helped him get into film school. He studied at the College of Santa Fe and later trained again at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, gaining comprehensive skills in writing, directing, producing, cinematography, editing, and sound.

He founded Haunting The Better in 1996 and moved to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1998, where the company is now based. Through it, he develops original feature screenplays and no-budget narrative films, and in the 2000s he directed two features, As He Fired Up the Drum Machine and Hey Android. Over thirty years, his work returns to the same concerns — place, voice, and the dark humor of ordinary life — shaped by roots in western Pennsylvania and a sensibility in which violence and tenderness sit at the same table.

https://hauntingthebetter.com
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