Matt Wilson

This Place Called Home

Like the Englishman Bruce Chatwin’s travel diaries with their amazingly sensitive and humanistic vision of a world vanished forever, the photographic wanderings of Matt Wilson — another Anglo-Saxon globetrotter — provide images of the various countries he has visited, taken without any preconceived ideas and according to the photographer’s mood and the people he encountered.

Although few in number, these modest and even anodyne photographs are so unusual in their subject matter and, counter to the trends of modern photography, presented in such small dimensions that we have to stop and scrutinize them close-up. In most cases the picture is slightly damaged due to the outdated film he uses. The visual result is opalescent, with a very obvious grain and decadent, low light that creates intimate shadowy zones for nocturnal scenes and a smoky, grey tone in diurnal landscapes. This technique of ‘chance’ shots that include the accidental in his photographic vision forms the essence of Matt Wilson’s language: clouding our view, but gradually drawing us like a magnet into a universe that is poetic and outside time. This style progressively structures the ensemble with a visual and vaguely narrative thread that leads us to imaginary lands on the edge of a waking dream.

Matt Wilson’s vision transports us from any definite epoch. Sometimes you could be looking at a Brueghelian landscape or a romantic description from the pages of 19th-century English literature; but he can also transplant us, almost brutally, to a cut-throat backstreet or a gang of black kids at a boxing match, while simultaneously your eye tries to catch the fleeting image of an old American automobile... So many almost unreal situations that inevitably recall the atmosphere of American films in the Sixties.

It is not Matt Wilson’s intention to capture reality, just an instant as he imagined or felt it, something he has experienced rather than seen. A thin photographic section like a microscopic slice of time and space, imbued with a perception of eternity and a sublime sense of the transitory. Although we are looking at a simple cliché, engendered by an almost banal encounter with humanity and the surrounding landscape.

Matt Wilson has travelled widely in Europe, beginning with his native England but also spending time in France, with which he feels an affinity, not forgetting the Eastern European countries he frequently returns to between two stays in Cuba. More recently he had the desire to cover new territory, the United States, where he has lived for the last decade. He might well have felt trepidation in approaching a theme that American photographers have already encompassed in magnificent style. But here too his vision is surprising, delivering an astonishing vision through snapshots of landscapes and men burned by a sun that finally sets over the vast landscape, creating ineffable moments where for a second you can deceive yourself, believe you are contemplating a watercolour.

The photography of Matt Wilson could be called a ‘visual metaphor’, the continuation of a purely pictorial approach, if his characters were not so firmly anchored in their time and their occasionally indigent everyday reality. Matt Wilson conveys what he sees through a poetic prism, yet he is also a reporter presenting contemporary society, often in straightforward scenes that are approached without any overtone of tragedy or pity. His attentive stare is better characterised as benevolent, but with a touch of light tragicomedy underlying the broad spectrum of profoundly humanist thought.

Christine Ollier,
Paris, February 2012