From attending veterans’ reunions to travelling twice to Vietnam and locating the areas where her brother was stationed, Hines confronted her own loss and sought personal closure in the process. At Chu Lai, where Gary worked as a crew chief on Chinook helicopters, the desolate, stormy landscapes seemed to embody her state of mind. By incorporating her thumb or shadow into the images, Hines reminds the viewer of her presence throughout, enmeshing her experiences with those of her brother.
The artist’s greatest challenge was photographing the invisible: how to picture someone who no longer exists and capture unseen trauma? Hines’ resulting experiments embrace serendipity, employing techniques such as light play and magnification to create otherworldly, ethereal images that give the illusion of memory. Frequently she incorporates metaphor. In one image, inspired by a dream related to her by one of Gary’s army comrades, Hines superimposes her brother’s portrait over a Chu Lai night sky sourced from Google Earth. His reflection in the dark reservoir below seems to symbolise the unconscious, something that Hines is continuously drawn to in her work.