William Pierson recalls his kindergarten teacher giving out brown slabs of rolled clay with which he and his classmates were to form and decorate candy dishes as Mother’s Day gifts. After looking around, he says he picked up a wooden block to form the clay around before trimming and painting the edge. He had, he says, “very particular feelings about it” being done, despite the teacher’s insistence that it needed more decoration. He still has it and still loves it, he boasts with a full laugh. “I never had to look outside of myself for confirmation of what’s good.”
Clay was not to be Pierson’s medium, however, and his show Transcendence opening Sept. 5 at the Morris Graves Museum of Art’s William Thonson Gallery marks 50 years of work in photography or, as he puts it, as “an artist who uses a camera.” The show is not a retrospective of his development or changing aesthetics over time. The images are indicative of where he is now, a period he describes as his freest and most exciting, though he hasn’t turned against his older work anymore than he has abandoned that first candy dish. In fact, he’s even found ways to incorporate elements of earlier images that seemed to have been waiting for their missing counterparts.
Pierson says he was never pressured to enter the family business at Pierson’s Building Center, though he cleaned the bathroom and swept floors for gas money as a teenager. So, he explored, taking classes at College of the Redwoods, including beginning photography with Roger Cinnamon in 1972. Before that, Pierson had taken photos with a point-and-shoot for his high school newspaper and yearbook, trying to snap something from the sidelines before a football player barreled into him. Cinnamon’s instruction showed him the possibility of making art with the camera. “I developed my first roll of film, took part in my first critique, showed my first photo as art and not a snapshot from vacation,” he recalls. Since then, “It’s been the anchor of my life.”
In the 1980s, when Pierson was in his 30s, he took on the garden shop at the building center, transforming it into a small oasis with a koi pond. “An artist can go wild there,” he says, with all the creative aspects and aesthetic decisions. “I’ve always endeavored to make myself as dispensable as possible,” says Pierson, chortling a bit, and so he hired a team that included Morgan Randall, who became general manager for more than 35 years before his recent retirement. “It is because of him and his remarkable abilities that allowed me to be ‘dispensable,’” says Pierson, who eventually took over ownership of the entire building center. “I was able to focus on my artwork and other pursuits.”
“It is a daily companion, a source of inspiration, interest,” says Pierson, “it involves you in the world in a more intimate way because your senses are … perceiving more because you care more about everything because in the end it comes out in your work.”
In the 1980s, he says, he was working with black and white 10-by-10-inch silver prints, looking for “what else was there beyond what was apparent.” He used multiple exposures with different timing, lighting, shutter speeds, “instead of thinking that reality was 1/30 of a second,” experimenting with layering several variations, some crisp, others ethereal. “How much more could I put into this single image?” he asked himself. “The goal is to produce work that resonates with your soul. And your soul knows,” he says, noting that this has remained the same for him over the decades. “It has nothing to do with your ego or a good review — it’s just, oh, your soul.”
But the restrictions of silver prints began to chafe. Pierson wanted to work with color, to work large. In 2006, he turned to digital photography. “You literally can do anything. There’s no restriction. Well, if I thought about it long enough, there’s probably some restriction,” he says chuckling. It was a steep learning curve for him both in terms of the photography and the printing, but he says the payoff has been worth it.
Before he died, Pierson’s friend and fellow photographer Sook Choo Kim told him he wasn’t going out and making new images of late. Kim, a world traveler and digital photographer, was instead mining old images he’d taken and doing more with them. The notion was inspiring for Pierson.
Now, Pierson says, instead of trying to show more than what is apparent, “I’m trying to show everything,” even across time and space. “On Aug. 4 of 2024, this idea came to me,” he says. He looked back at his 2008 photo he took of a crow from Bear Basin Lookout National Forest, one he’d forgotten. He also had 7- and 8-hour exposures of the North Star with the other stars in the sky rotating around it — those never resonated for him the way he’d hoped. “The final thing that made them work wasn’t there,” he realized, but in a couple hours of work, the images of the bird and the stars came together and gave him what he was looking for, yielding, “Raven Returning from the North Star.”
“I was just knocked out,” says Pierson. “I had given myself permission to do things I’d never done before,” combining elements from different places and times. He’d been taught, he says, “the sun rose and set on Ansel Adams” and a photographer should “print the whole image no matter what.” But now he felt released to run loose. “The ideas came so fast I kept a diary of them on my phone,” he says, sometimes noting them in the middle of the night. Inspiration started coming from all directions and he saw it as the universe helping him along. “I had no idea at the beginning what I was going to have at the end and that was so exhilarating.”
There are birds aplenty in Transcendence, sometimes a time-lapse tracking as in “The Path of Pure Consciousness,” sometimes only a hyper-detailed wing dipping into view as in “Migration.” Juxtaposition and blending bring forth as much of the ethereal as the almost comically grim (see “Egret in Physical Space and Mystical Time” and “Vulture Wake at Night”). But Pierson is clearly enjoying the freedom of his medium and fruits of his back catalog.
After all, he says, “There isn’t a single photograph that I took … that I wouldn’t take again today,” even though he might see something different now. “I was always trying to get more of the moment.”
William Pierson’s Transcendence at the Morris Graves Museum of Art’s William Thonson Gallery (636 F St., Eureka) runs Sept. 5-Oct. 25. See more of his work at williampierson.com.
This article appears in ‘More of the Moment’.
