“Portland’s kind of a hot topic,” Sky Wilson says, alluding to the Oregon city’s ongoing social issues. “There’s a lot of hands on the city and people wanting to put their mark on it, but I’m hopeful.” Widely considered a liberal enclave – its residents have voted Democrat in every presidential election since 1988 – in recent years, it has also become a centrepiece for some of America’s foremost fascist groups, with multiple rallies organised by the Proud Boys. Elsewhere, its unhoused communities increasingly figure in local politics, subject to divisive relocation policies that are reshaping neighbourhoods. “Personally, I’ve never shied away from the gritty aspects, but I don’t want to overindulge and make work about that because I don’t see it that way,” Sky, who moved to the “Rose City” from Kennesaw, Georgia, as an eight-year-old, tells me. “I like to find the beauty in it, the subtle, mundane beauty.”
His debut monograph, Neighbours, which employs the city’s buildings, parks and interior spaces as a backdrop for his portrait series, is the product of a more personal spell that followed the birth of his first child. Wandering the city simultaneously in search of physiological solitude and interesting characters, Sky came across quiet moments and undisturbed pockets, which he’s documented across the new book’s pages, captured in calming monochrome. As his protagonists look straight into the camera’s lens, he observes young couples linking arms and individuals on a break from work and leisure, interspersing these images of shop fronts and park landscapes. “I know these locations even if I have never been to them,” writes Will Matsuda in the accompanying text. “It is in these mundane, everyday spaces, that life is lived.”
“There was no political [angle], really. I think I was nostalgic, honestly, afraid to embrace the future,” Sky says. “Shifting identities was a struggle – I think a lot of people can relate – and my instinct was to walk around outside, like therapy.” Interested both in his nearby surroundings and the people he passed on the street, he imagined specific pictures and became drawn to the challenge of making physical the scenarios he thought up in his head. “It ended up being a world-building exercise, where you’re finding characters that live in this world, but you also have to show the world that you see,” he says. “I was also looking outward because I was tired and fighting boredom, not wanting to deal with my own stuff. So it became this thing where I had to engage with people.”
Shot in 2022, the walks themselves were prioritised over making any work, Sky says, who didn’t introduce a camera until further down the line. “I would spend a lot of time walking, just with my thoughts taking iPhone pictures, building a mental Rolodex of places,” he says. Still at the mercy of a busy work schedule – and later shooting within the parameters set by his daughter’s sleep pattern and the hours his parents were able to watch her – Neighbours came together over several months spread through the year. Adamant the project be consent-based meant classic street photography was dismissed, and, instead, Sky had to deliver his intentions quickly. “It was a weird time of day, and I was very aware of people’s time limit. I’d just say, ‘I’m a photographer making this sort of work, you’re really interesting, would you mind walking a couple blocks with me’ – that was the awkward part because you want them to be comfortable, but usually there was a mutual curiosity.”
First arriving at photography via high school and the skate culture that pervaded his youth, Sky’s current practice was informed by the work he found on his lunch breaks. “I would hide in the library, and somehow I ran across a Joel Sternfeld book, which I just thought looked really bizarrely pretty,” he says. “It was my first exposure to that kind of aesthetic, or that level of visual taste – a curated way of seeing things. Richard Renaldi was also a huge influence – I actually took a workshop with him before I was making photos, just out of curiosity because I thought it was cool how he engaged with the subjects, more of a concept and production than ‘a miracle of a photo’.” His own photos, while wholly considered, were made through a combination of serendipity and a fear of going home empty-handed, he says. “[The idea of] having those regrets drove the instinct, and because I didn’t really hang out in one place, it was pretty much luck and telling myself to talk to that person right now.”
While not an explicit feature of the work, Sky’s early life similarly shaped the images that fill Neighbours: adopted from Korea as a baby and later moving from Kennesaw to Portland, the whitest major city in America today, his visual and personal sensibility was informed by this distinct perspective. “Growing up as an Asian person, I was interested in how people perceived me and, in turn, how I perceived them,” he says. “So being on the streets, talking to people, that whole process of photography is what drives me – it can be more interesting than the photo itself.” The Neighbours moniker also speaks to this concept of relationships and how we define ourselves, particularly around others. “Initially, it was the idea that these people were strangers to me, but I thought that was a bit of a cold-sounding word,” he finishes. “I live out here, so it was a different way to look at that relationship, between me and the subjects, and the way I hoped they perceived me as a local person.”
‘Neighbours’ is published by Palm*Studios and available to pre-order here
Credits
All Photographs © Sky Wilson, 2023 © Palm*Studios for this publication, 2023