Documenting memories, histories and stories set in the surrounding landscapes, Marc Wilson works on long-term documentary and topographic projects.
He often blends landscape, documentary, portrait and still life photography as well as audio interviews and sound recordings. The result is a web of deeply connected histories and stories that aim to tell us as much about our present – and even our future – as they do our past.
His most recent book, The Edge of Ruin is Marc’s seventh photo book. His first, The Last Stand,was first published in 2014 and is now on its fourth edition (fifth print run). His 2015-2021 body of work, A Wounded Landscape – bearing witness to the Holocaust, is centred around 22 witness accounts of the Holocaust. For the project, Marc travelled through 24 countries over a six-year period. In 2023 he published The Land is Yellow, the Sky is Blue, which he made with his wife Anna, about the small village of Balakliya in Central Ukraine.
He has exhibited in the UK (including solo exhibitions at Impressions Gallery, Bradford and Side Gallery, Newcastle), in Belgium at The House of European History, and in Italy, France, Greece, Israel and India. International publications, including National Geographic, the Financial Times and Leica Fotografie International (LFI), have featured Marc’s stories.
Several collections hold Marc’s work, including those of the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
He also works as a visiting lecturer at various universities in the UK and mentors individual photographers both in person and online.
Selected Awards / Publications / Talks / Reviews:
2026 Wallpaper Magazine
2025 On Landscape magazine
2025 A Small Voice podcast
2025 Photo North Photo festival - talk
2025 Frames magazine
2024 Leica Fotografie International magazine
2023 ArtDoc Photography magazine
2023 The RPS The Decisive Moment magazine
2023 The Guardian
2023 FT.Com/Magazine
2023 Photo Frome - talk
2023 RPS - talk
2023 Zaborona Media (Ukraine)
2022 Lucie Photobook Prize
2022 Dezeen Magazine
2022 Atlantic magazine, New York.
2022 National Geographic
2022 Mail Online2022 National Geographic
2021 Memoria magazine - The Auschwitz museum
2021 Process Driven - audio
2021 The Times of Israel
2020 National Geographic
2019 Kaunas Pilnas Kulturos - interview (radio and print)
2019 Holland America ship Guest lecturer, Japan.
2018 The Toni Schiff Memorial Fund
2018 The Wiener library for Holocaust and Genocide research - talk
2018 Holland America ship Guest lecturer, The South Pacific
2017 The Army and Navy Club, London - talk
2016 Natural History Museum - talk
2016 Radio Resonance conversation
2016 Digital camera Magazine
2016 Professional Photography Magazine
2015 Source
2015 The Telegraph
2015 The Times
2015 The Daily Mail
2015 Wired
2015 Colin Pantall book review
2015 Dezeen
2014 Vice
2014 The Daily Mail
2014 Grafik
2014 Architects Journal
2014 Raw View Magazine
2014 Design Observer / Places Journal
2014 The Guardian Online
2104 Radio 2 talk show - Jeremy Vine
2014 BBC In Pictures
2014 Culture 24
2014 Photoforum - talk
2012 Wayne Ford The Last Stand
2013 Terry O'Neil Award
2013 Photomonitor The Last Stand
2012 aCurator magazine
2010 Le Monde magazine, Paris
2006 PDN Photo Annual
2000 Published in British Journal of Photography
1995 Published in British Journal of Photography
Exhibitions:
2025 The Northern Eye Photo Festival
2025 Presence of the Past - The House of European History
2025 Photo North Photo festival
2024 Impressions Gallery, Bradford. Solo show
2023 Indian Photo Festival, Hyderabad
2023 The Northern Eye Photo Festival. Solo show
2023 Side Gallery, Newcastle. Solo show
2022 Gallerie Trento, Piedicastello, Italy. Solo show
2022 Spazio Klien, Borgo Valsugana, Italy. Solo show
2022 Athens Photobook Festival
2019 Memory and Light festival, (Kaunuas 2022), Lithuania.
2018 Permanent collection - Holocaust Exhibition & learning centre, Huddersfield.
2018 Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Group show
2017 Oriel Colwyn gallery, Wales. Solo show
2016 Bonhoga gallery, Shetland. Solo show
2015 Romania photo festival
2015 Athens Photo Festival, Benaki Museum - Main exhibition
2014 Peacock Visual Arts Aberdeen. Solo show
2013-2014 The Royal Armouries Museum Leeds. Solo show
2013 Anise Gallery, London. Solo show
2013 The Royal Armouries Museum Fort Nelson, Portsmouth. Solo show
2013 The Affordable Art Fair Eyestorm New York & London
2013 Terry O'Neill Award Lucy Bell gallery, St Leonards
2013 Terry O'Neill Award The Strand gallery, London
2010 Landscape One, The Lucy Bell Gallery, Group show
2006 Association of Photographers, London. Group show
2006 Association of Photographers, London, Sublime. Group show
2005 New York contemporary art fair. Group show
2005 Photo2005, Affordable art fair. Group show
2004 Fluid gallery, Grenoble, France, Solo show
2003 Greenpeace Save or delete exhibition, London. Group show
2002 Victoria and Albert Museum, Dislocation
2001 Art 2001, London, Group show
2000 Focal Point gallery, Southend, Solo show
1999 Now Showing Gallery, London. Solo show
1996 The Photographers Gallery, London. Group show
1996 Instituto Europeo del Design, Milan. Group show
1996 The Back Hill Gallery, Clerkenwell. London. Solo show
Education:
Ma Photography LCP (1999)
Ba Photography LCP (1996)
BSc Sociology Edinburgh University (1992)
A wounded landscape: - Ben Barkow, Director, The Wiener Library for the study of the Holocaust & Genocide.
“I became aware of Marc Wilson’s photography approximately three years ago and it made an immediate, powerful and lasting impression on me. The Wiener Library has numerous opportunities to see artistic responses to the Holocaust, and I can state unambiguously that Marc’s work is among the finest and most sensitive that we have seen in many years. What impresses me most is that Marc achieves a haunting, even lyrical beauty without ever straying into sentimentality or the emotional exploitation of a notoriously difficult and challenging subject matter.
His art speaks of the most terrible crimes, and how these are both altered and unaltered through the passage of time. He testifies to the lasting physical and spiritual echoes of mass murder but does so in a way that is wholly allied with the suffering of victims. In this way he manages to offer us something akin to consolation, even as he asks us to recall and contemplate the horror of the Holocaust.
His work is a forceful and necessary reminder of the vast geographical range over which the murders took place, but the uniqueness of each location he photographs recalls the uniqueness of each human being murdered there. In this he counters a prevailing tendency in Holocaust commemoration to focus only on individual survivor stories which – paradoxically – tends to obscure public understanding of the victims.
The experience of stumbling unexpectedly across an exhibition of his work in Oxford brought home to me the exceptional power of this imagery.
Since first encountering Marc’s work I have been impressed by his willingness to enter into dialogue with the Wiener Library about the progress of his work and I was delighted when he agreed to speak to our audiences about his project. He is committed to the aim of wide public engagement and has embarked on wide ranging dialogue with many of the most reputable institutions in our field. In this way he can reach out to and engage with audiences keen to explore the legacies of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but also the wider issues of how art and photography can contribute to our understanding and coming-to-terms with legacies of trauma.
The Wiener Library is keen to support Marc as he progresses his work and looks for innovative ways to seek new audiences. We are actively exploring how his work can be used in connection with relevant anniversaries, openings and other events to illuminate and challenge.”
The Last Stand – Review by Colin Pantell, 2015.
There is something quite compelling about finding old war defences on the British coastline. Without even looking for them, you stumble on bunkers, radar stations and old radio bases, curious constructions that were never quite put to their fullest possible use and have been left to decay in the face of the sea and the salt and the wind.
These sea defences are the subject of Marc Wilson's book, The Last Stand: Northern Europe, in which he travels around Europe photographing the sea defences of Britain, Belgium, Denmark, Norway and France.
It's large format work and it's quite beautiful (Paul Virilio's Bunker Archaeology may be the most recognised photography of sea defences but that's a different kind of book) . Everything is shot in subdued diffused light, the pre-dawn it looks like much of the time, and the way in which the different defences merge and crumble into the landscape of which they are now part.
At Sainte-Margtuerite-sur-Mer in Normandy, the grey brutalism of bunkers meets with the brutalism of crumbling cliffs, the plates of concrete mirroriing the tectonic plates of a shifting earth. On the pebble beaches, the shards of blackened concrete look like the remains of ancient megaliths, while on the grey sand stretches the slabs look almost soft and malleable.
The Scandanavian defences take on a pagan look. At Vorupor in Denmark, a radar receiver is buried into what looks like peat bog, while on the beach the batteries (which could fire 495 kilogramme projectiles) look like the remains of particularly malevolent beetles.
At Haugesund in Norway, the batteries are folded into the basalt rock formations. The top of one bunker peeks out from a pile of shattered rock like the top of some strange helmet, the opening a visor from which some mysterious being looks out upon the world.
The most attractive patterns are made by tank walls, the one-kilometre wall at Newburgh, Scotland being a particularly fine example, while the anti-submarine barrier in the Firth of Forth is known as 'the dragons' teeth' for good reason.
The English sea defences are curious and range from old gun placements on the white cliffs between Dover and Folkestone and the defences at Studland Bay in Dorset, the bay where the full-scale rehearsal for D-Day took place.
The Last Stand is as multi-layered as the landscapes which it features; there's historical detail wrapped folded over into a chronotopia of functional brutalism, mixed with local touches that feeds into the geological, panoramic and tactical.
All the boxes are ticked in Robert Adams traditional landscape list: there's geography, autobiography, and metaphor. But on top of that, Wilson gives us a politicised view of landscape and power that ties back to survey photography of Timothy O'Sullivan and the work of Mitch Epstein.
Layered into that is an Arcadian vision. With its focus on Northern Europe it's a dystopian Arcadia; there is a pagan feel to Wilson's pictures, a syncretic vision where geology, flora, climate and war find a single expression. And it's beautiful.