He is best known for his writing about color and digital imaging and about the history of photography, and as an advocate for photographers who offer a haptic, expressionist interpretation of their subject matter.
During the past decade, Hirsch's visual projects—such as World in a Jar: War & Trauma; Manifest Destiny & the American West; Unseen Terror: A Culture of Fear; The Sixties Cubed; and Ghosts: French Holocaust Children—have explored the interrelationship of historical images with memory and time.
Hirsch has rephotographed and recontextualized images into three-dimensional installations in order to investigate ethnic violence, genocide, religious intolerance, and war.
In Hirsch's hands the mixing of the trivial and the serious, the accidental and horrifyingly deliberate, make it seem that every piece is part and parcel of some overarching human drama larger than the sum of these parts.”[7] Of an earlier work, The Architecture of Landscape, Jeffrey Hoone, executive director of Light Work, wrote: “Hirsch gives the viewer a variety of issues, concerns, and techniques to think about and digest.
He massages meaning out of every nuance in the series from the choice of subject to the scale of the images, and each decision that he has made seems to open up opportunities for further investigation.”[8] Of Hirsch's recent exhibition The Sixties Cubed, critic and artist Bruce Adams wrote: “At the core of this work—and perhaps of all Hirsch’s art in recent memory—is [Brion] Gysin's cut-up technique, which utilizes the element of chance in its random rearrangement of sentence fragments."
Hirsch, Adams wrote, created "a free-flowing account of a decade as seen through the images it produced, resulting in fragmented nonlinear multiple narratives.