Artist's Statement
In an early body of work, I photographed the pristine natural landscape. These photographs often emerged from the narrow gap between the constricting presence of the hands of man. They were often defined by what I didn’t want to see, by the road just off one edge of the film, by the fence off the other. For me, that early body of work supports a view of natural landscapes unchanged, original, without people, without built things.
More recently, I became fascinated by the opposite, by the road itself, by the fence, by the dialogue between man and his built environment. It is this dialogue that my recent photographs document. They are photographs about what is overlooked, what is passed by, what is considered mundane. My lens is directed at a landscape and objects created and often disregarded by man. I search out the unique composition and narrative discovered in a worn and used structure or the surprising scale of an industrial landscape. This body of work is an examination of our dialogue with our environment, our creation of landscape.
My photography is primarily in a 4x5 medium. The process of composition on a field of ground glass, without mirrors, seeing precisely the light that will fall on the film, is a process that is distinct from other photography. Each image is a significant time investment, and the elaborate ritual of large format photography makes my vision more conscious, more deliberate.
David Stark Wilson, born in Berkeley, California, has been a building designer for over fifteen years. His award-winning design work have been widely published. An avid mountaineer and skier, he developed a love of photography at an early age. David's photographs have appeared in Sunset, Better Homes and Gardens, and San Francisco Magazine. David's interests in design and photography converged during his back-road encounters with the austere agricultural buildings of the Central Valley.
You can see more of David Wilson's design work at www.davidstarkwilson.com.
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David Stark Wilson
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