Noah Wilson: Our Land

Noah Wilson: Our Land

Photographer Noah Wilson was born in Key West, Florida, and moved to San Diego, California, when he was five years old. He has lived in Northern California for the last fifteen years, first living in Humboldt County and then moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. Wilson earned a Master of Fine Arts from San Jose State University and studied art history at Humboldt State University.

Wilson's images are derived from early twentieth-century negatives he acquired while working as artist-in-residence at Recology in San Francisco. Many of the negatives depict scenes from national and state parks in California and many other locations throughout the American West. Due to the unstable nature of this film, the negatives exist in various stages of deterioration and distress. The negatives have a nitrocellulose base, a medium used from 1889 to1930s, but replaced in the 1920s by Kodak "Safety Film" because of its proclivity to decay and self-combust.

Wilson used a flatbed scanner and sunlight as a backlighting source to record both the photographic information and the surface of the negatives. Depending on the quality of the sunlight (diffused or direct), he captured a different interpretation of the negative with each scan. Creating images from different scans, Wilson produced a composite that portrayed the place that was photographed as well as the degradation of the film medium.

Deterioration has created colored areas in the monochromatic negatives. Sunlight adds color, simply because of the colors inherent in the spectrum. The scanner records all of these different colors along with the original photographic information in the negatives, producing color in what would otherwise be monochromatic images.

Within the creative process, experimentation is paramount. Wilson employs a compelling and innovative approach by applying new and old technology to twentieth-century negatives. Our Land acknowledges the importance of past legacies in the history of photography and envisions new ways of seeing for the future.

Photography is not permitted.
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This exhibit is beyond the security checkpoint, where only ticketed passengers are allowed.