Photography Exhibit by Will Boyce

Today begins the Matthews-Fuller Health Sciences Library display of work by Geisel medical student, Will Boyce.  He shares with us some printed pieces from his collection entitled, “Solitude: Severed and Tangled”, a series that spans many years of photography and a dispersed array of locations: from Bilbao, Spain to the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.

He also shares from his digital collection entitled, “Portrait’s of Cite Soleil ­Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1988 -­ 2010” a series that reaches across decades of trips to Haiti, working in the primary slum of Haiti, Cite Soleil.  Will’s art will be on display in the Matthews-Fuller Library until January 15th, 2016.  Please stop by any time, Monday through Friday from 8am – 6pm to enjoy a look at his fine work.  For more information, please contact the library at 603-650-7658.

About the Exhibit:

Boyce-photo1Boyce-photo2This series spans many years of photography and a dispersed array of locations: from Bilbao, Spain to the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. The unifying theme looks at the modern flavor of independence that can be equally isolating as well as liberating, while within a shared, collective human experience. The photo from Bilbao of the people waiting for the bus with the poster of the woman enraged behind them with their mutual displeasure redolent on their faces versus the angelic young girl silhouetted by the setting sun, liberated and seemingly on the verge of flight in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria Island demonstrate these diametric themes of experience that is both separate and entwined. In the Bilbao photo there is a shared human experience, symbolized by the rage in the poster, the umbrella encompassing it all, and the collective enmity in their expressions.

Boyce-photo3This theme of individualization within a collective human experience can be seen through a temporal lens in the other silhouetted photo of the series. The man walking through a rubble strewn landscape, framed by the ancient walls of Istanbul on his left, the leafless tree, and the distant, homogenous apartment buildings on the far right represents how we all are born into a time, caught between the past (ancient walls of Istanbul) and the present (modern apartment buildings) with the aggregate discards of time left for us to manage. Our time, our lives are built into the burgeoning and changing collective consciousness of our time and place, yet we are born, engage, and die unaccompanied.

Portrait’s of Cite Soleil – Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1988 – 2010
The digital series reaches across decades of trips to Haiti, working in the primary slum of Haiti, Cite Soleil. One of the poorest, most densely populated places on the planet, Cite Soleil was created by the former Haitian dictator Duvalier in an effort to entice rural citizens to the city with a promise of work at an American sugar processing facility in 1958. Duvalier knew that the swarm of transplants would far surpass the available positions and this in turn would keep wages inhumanely low, luring even more American businesses. For example, until automation, all Major League baseballs were hand made in Haiti and the stretching of the leather by workers permanently debilitated their chest muscles within years of employment. Originally the commune was named after Duvalier’s wife “Simone” (Cite Simone). Once Duvalier was ousted, the name was changed to Cite Soleil (City of the Sun).

-Will Boyce

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