Portfolio: Nicholas Walster

by Beth E. Wilson, March 26, 2008

Photographer Nicholas Walster was born and raised in northern England, studied photography in London, and eventually emigrated to the US, where he’s lived for the past 20 years.

His most recent series of works, called Personal Panoramas, circle back through the memories and the places he’s found himself throughout his life. Strung out as a series of cinematic frames, he’s combined both historical and contemporary images of members of his family and himself at various stages of life, alongside evocatively blurred, vignetted images of nature and landscape that ground the mental/emotional voyage represented in the works. The contrast between the variously toned archival images and the subtly colored new photographs yoked to them—along with the variability of focus throughout—seems to effortlessly embody the complexity and beauty of memory, and the sometimes unexpected linkages we make between feelings and moments in time.
Walster plans to show these works in October at the Sharada Gallery in Rhinebeck. Portfolio: www.nicholaswalster.com.

The return of the text
I was born in Yorkshire, and when I was 18 I went to the University of Westminster (then it was called the Polytechnic of Central London), which was the only department offering a photographic degree in England. I studied there under a man called Victor Burgin. I arrived with the naïve thinking of a Yorkshire lad—I was very much in love with the nature of photography, and the pure visual expression that it afforded me—and to people like Victor, the whole Marxist/semiotic nature of photographic discourse at that time was very opposed to that. Their basic idea was that there wasn’t a pure visual experience, and everything had to be translated into language or signs, as the semioticians called it. I was very much opposed to that in my mind, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to see that as a very intriguing idea for me, and also a very visually interesting idea, in terms of combining text and image, and how that refers to what I now believe are our individual perceptions, how they dictate the world that we see, and how we overlay the world with our own perceptions.

Language and distance
The Inner Light series came about after I had a near death experience in 2005, where I fell 22 feet out of a tree with a chainsaw. Dramatic experiences like that have a very interesting impact on the interpretation of time to us, when we look back at them. When you do the mathematics of it, it only took a sixth of a second or something for me to fall that distance. But in my own mind, [the time] was completely expanded, and in that expansion of time, I had this experience of seeing a lot of the images I had taken as a photographer over a 30-year span of time, and they were presented in a completely different way, in a shadow box, in which you looked at them literally through language. I saw the shadow box was surrounded by red funereal velvet, and encased in a black outer frame. That lead to the Inner Light series, where I tried to create in material what I had envisioned in that near death experience. The series is literally looking through language [written on a transparent pane] at images, literally lit from within. It’s a visual metaphor for how I feel that we look at the world.