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Rangefinder
Magazine Profile: David Stark Wilson by Lou Jacobs, Jr. When David Wilson was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, his family made regular trips to the Sierra Nevada. His memories of the orchard rows and furrows of California’s Central Valley as well as the oak-studded foothills remain vivid. His father, Les Wilson, was an active mountaineer and outdoor adventurer with a career in computer software and financial market analysis. His mother, Holly Wilson, is a weaver. David inherited his father’s restlessness, became an avid mountaineer, and, by the time he graduated from UC Berkeley (in 1984 with a degree in pure mathematics), he had climbed peaks on four continents.
He began photographing in high school in 35mm black and white, and later had a fine mentor in Galen Rowell, with whom he climbed extensively throughout the ’80s and early ’90s. “He was certainly an influence on my landscape work,” David explains, “but not on the body of work covered in my book.” He refers to Structures of Utility, published in 2003 by Heyday Books in Berkeley, CA. It’s a beautiful black-and-white collection of Central Valley landscapes and utilitarian structures from aqueducts to barns to grain storage buildings. The book’s pictures and layout are enticing, and we’ll get to details. In early travels David amassed a stock of 35mm color slides, but when I asked if black and white had satisfied his interpretive urges for the book, he said, “Definitely. What is compelling in the structures I photograph is the form, in most cases. Doing those working buildings and relics in color would have been simply distracting.” As well as a photographer, David Wilson has been a building designer for more than 15 years. Asked if that meant he was an architect, he told me, “I haven’t had the need for an architect’s license because I do residential work primarily, so technically I’m not an architect, but that’s what I do. I began designing while I was still at Berkeley because I became interested in architecture. I began designing small remodels, then whole houses. Early on, my design sense was strongly influenced by the work of architect Bernard Maybeck who was a local hero architect in the Bay Area.” David says his approach to design emphasizes the interrelationship of building and site.
In due time David began photographing his own buildings; “It was quite a learning curve,” he states, “especially regarding interior lighting. I shot a lot of Polaroids learning to balance flash and daylight as I went along. “ I developed a good portfolio and a few different publications such as Sunset and San Francisco Magazine have been clients. Actually, architectural photography isn’t a primary goal for me. I embrace it when it comes my way.” His interest in design and photography converged during his back-road exposure to austere agricultural buildings that he photographed over several years. That effort became the book in which David has also written his feelings and observations. I’ve chosen some of his words that I feel best enlighten us about his approach to seeing myriad subjects. He began studying photographic potentials in the Central Valley while commuting between work and home. “I became captivated by the agricultural buildings that punctuate the landscape,” he professes. “The vertical forms of grain elevators… interrupt the valley’s level terrain.” He sees mystery revealed as shadows, structure and details. “The elevators are equaled in eccentricity by oversized storage sheds housing lanky, intri-cately evolved” machines. “In the foothills, long-abandoned mines reveal only their head frames…. There is a scale and uniqueness to these forms that I have found often in nature but rarely in the built world. “ Designing a building, I labored for the very qualities [these structures] embodied—purity and lack of pretense. Their origins were simple utility… yet they had attained an elusive and austere elegance. The structures haunted me…. I began, casually at first, to document the buildings I most enjoyed.”
Once, searching for a favorite grain elevator, David drove many roads only to find the elevator had been demolished to make way for a new bank headquarters. He realized that the structures he found profoundly appealing were being destroyed, and his resolve to photograph more of them increased. At first, he says, “35mm quality failed to capture the plainspoken quality I wanted.” He realized a need for swings and tilts to properly portray his subjects. Switching to 4x5 increased his control, and he adds, “The time-consuming process led me to consider my subjects and their composition more rigorously. Each image was a significant investment, and my vision became more deliberate in response.” Ninety-five percent of Structures of Utility was photographed with a Sinar F 4x5 view camera or a Canham 4x5, a format which David finds satisfyingly large enough.
Initially, the work of German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher influenced David’s work. They had shot a number of European building types in “dead, flat light,” he says, which he also used for a number of landscapes and buildings in his book. He explains, “By photographing in the flat light of overcast days, the Bechers achieve an impartial rendering of their subjects…. I watch the weather for those infrequent days when the Central Valley is bathed in the diffuse light of a mackerel sky.” But eventually he came to believe “that the intense California sunlight and deep shadows were essential to many images, as much a part of the compositions as the structures themselves.” He decided to photograph in light that he found most compelling for the structural forms he sought. He adds, “I wanted my photographs to address the landscape—the context—to provide a narrative of specific place and circumstances.” He went for the lighting that “accentuated the essential form, texture or environment.” “ As the [book] project progressed, I included much tighter subjects, details or larger structures or textural studies. Occasionally I strayed and focused my camera on the agricultural landscape.” He feels that the structures, and there is a great variety, were a reflection of human endeavors on the land, and they inspired awareness of how people interacted with buildings and landscape. Their deeply functional forms are “rooted in the land and local history,” David observes.
“ In vast landscapes and in close-ups, many of the structures are living ghosts. There’s a “romantic quality to their presence…. This sense of abandonment is part of what attracts me.” Their absolute silence reminds him of the mountains. “Replete with elaborate machinery, the buildings are tranquil, meditative. I catch them sleeping.” Often in the book are pages of small photographs showing multiple aspects of one structure. David Wilson’s work is both esthetically and technically rewarding, so I wondered if he was enamored of what can be a mystique, i.e., developing and printing one’s own black and whites. He was forthright: “I made an early decision about where I wanted to spend my time, and I don’t do my own negatives and prints. This has been frustrating at times, but it has worked out well. My favorite film now is T-max 100, exposed at E.I. 50. Iris Davis in Oakland started me on it. She prints the Dorothea Lange collection for the Oakland Museum, and she develops my film in T-max RS developer at 75°F for 6.5 minutes. The result is wonderful negatives. “ Iris printed about 85 percent of the originals for the book on RC paper, and for the other 15 percent I took the digital route with 100 MB drum scans, output to a digital C print with normal photo chemistry. Prints were made to the size of the book’s reproduction. “ I used Tri-X rated at E.I. 200 for a long while, and it responds beautifully to push-pull processing. I also use filters to ‘interpret’ some subjects, and I’m a fan of very dense negatives. T-max, I’ve found, is not tolerant to pushing and pulling, so I avoid it mostly.” The photographs in Structures of Utility are handsomely presented and David gives much credit to the book’s designer Todd Foreman and his staff at Public Design in San Francisco, with whom he worked closely.
Asked about his writing skill, David said, “I went to an excellent high school and never got an A on a paper. Writing is extremely hard. I can’t imagine doing it on a short-deadline basis for a living. For the book I know the mood I wanted, as a friend put it, ‘an ambling old horse mood,’ and I think it works. It was a very personal project for me.” I have numerous black and white visually expository books on my shelves and I feel that David Stark Wilson’s first effort in this category stands well with the best. Lou Jacobs Jr.
is the author of 25 how-to photography
books, the latest of which,
Photographer’s Lighting Handbook
(Amherst Media) was recently published.
He has taught at UCLA and Brooks, is
a longtime member
of ASMP, and enjoys shooting stock during
his travels in the U.S. and abroad. |
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