Julian Hibbard is a British photographer and author recognized for his compelling and enigmatic images that often maintain a palpable tension between the real and the imagined. He earned his bachelor of fine arts degree from Kingston University in London where he studied intermedia fine art. This interdisciplinary training led him toward his chosen career of photography, and his work has since been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Scotland, Chile, and at the prestigious Fundacion Roson Arte Contemporaneo in Spain. He is the author of The Noir A-Z: A Modern Abecedary as Imagined by Julian Hibbard (2009) and Schematics: A Love Story (2011)--two books that break with the conventions of photo books and explore different sorts of visual narratives. The Noir A-Z is an alphabet of twenty-six graphic incidents accompanying dominant terms from the noir universe. In the book, word and image come together in stories the viewer must tell--stories the reader discovers or invents as the relationships between word and image are discerned. In the subsequent publication--also a unique and experimental board book--he pairs found scientific line graphics with simple prose to form a narrative language in which life is mapped, charted, and diagrammed. Hibbard lives in New York City with his wife and son. This interview took place via email in the Fall of 2015. DAVID LAROCCA: You're a photographer, yet your most recent book, Schematics: A Love Story (Mark Batty Publisher, 2011) contains no photographs. JULIAN HIBBARD: Yes, it's true; although I'm generally known as a photographer, the book contains no images made by a camera. DL: Was the idea, then, to translate your capacities as a photographer into some other kind of imaging? JH: Yes, I wanted to investigate a different form of visual expression. Though I sometimes struggle to understand the phenomena they describe, I began to see great beauty in diagrams. Everybody understands that a heartbeat can be represented as a pulse moving across a screen, or that magnetism is a law' of attraction, and I wondered if these sorts of ideas--or descriptions--could be taken further, and if diagrams could be used to illustrate a loose narrative, and thus to construct a simple language. DL: We should back up then, and consider where and how Schematics emerges from your earlier photographs and practice as a photographer. JH: Sure. DL: I initially came across your work around the time of the publication of your first book, The Noir A-Z (Mark Batty Publisher, 2009). The book takes its shape as a board book--a form familiar to our young children--but its subject matter is anything but childish. Its playfulness as an object creates a tension with the menace and threat apparent in the words and photographs it contains (hence the noir). I had the chance to critique the book for a previous issue of Afterimage. [Ed. note: See David LaRocca's essay in Afterimage 38, no. 5.] Another aspect of the book's engagement with primal forms is its pronounced use of the alphabet (hence the subtitle). But again, the abc's here are not apple, bear, and candle, but abandoned, bound, and caught. This board book, then, juxtaposes a letter/word/concept with a highly stylized, sharply focused photograph that befits the lighting and staging of fashion editorials. JH: The Noir A-Z was my first foray into a book format that breaks with convention and invites the viewer to explore boundaries, and to become, as it were, the condition for interpretation. The word component happened once I started to identify and categorize certain recurrent psychological themes in my work. As I began putting words to images, an alphabet with dark and provocative undertones emerged. Thus, The Noir A-Z was driven first by an image, and though many of the images have been described as being meticulously lit and as looking like fashion images, I don't operate commercially in the world of fashion editorials. …