Aaron Hawks

San Francisco, CA … Aaron Hawks captures a world that combines illusions and sexuality in settings that are reminiscent of his own childhood meanderings. Old, decrepit hotel rooms and run-down buildings set the stage for his potent observations. His photography saturates the observer in stark environments of loss, loneliness, and pain; yet brilliantly evokes the determined human struggle for solace and understanding. Dissecting fantasies from the sexual subconscious and distilling questions of power, pride, and will; Aaron Hawks continues to explore the fringes of the observed.

The secret to Aaron’s art isn’t just his technical capability or the subconscious interpretation of sexual messages his portraits deliver, but the actual sets, which are hand-built and designed in his warehouse.

From Seattle, Washington, now living in Emeryville, California, Aaron has been photographing for 15 years, honing his skills as a master of the melancholic still. The women in his sets are artists, real sex workers and fetishists whose beauty, grit, intensity, and self-awareness inspire his art, culminating in the untraditional documentation of timeless records of sexual noir.