Photographer Wayne Swanson has created a visual love letter of sorts to his father and his father’s craft of furniture design and making, with his project, From the Workshop. In fact, the approach to Wayne’s photographs and the stories they tell are as unique as the furniture they celebrate. This series sits in the realm of memory and family; in some ways, they are maps that define and investigate a father’s passion, the depth of which was only recently discovered.
Wayne Swanson is a photographer living in San Diego. Born and raised in Chicago, he still clings to his Midwestern sensibility. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. His career has included writing and photography for newspapers, magazines, book publishers, and corporate clients.
Currently focusing on fine art and documentary photography, his recent work has been featured in Shots, The Hand, and Light Leaked magazines, exhibitions at Dab Art and PhotoPlace galleries, and on Aint-Bad.com. He is drawn to images with a sense of place, atmosphere, time, memory, and a subtle sense of humor.
From the Workshop
From the Workshop is a celebration of family, craftsmanship, and the urge to create. My father was a mechanical engineer by profession, but woodworking was his passion. He was most content in his workshop (a.k.a. the garage of our family home), surrounded by his tools and piles of assorted soft- and hardwoods. Each new project was an invitation to explore styles, materials, and woodworking techniques to create something that was uniquely his own.
The furniture he made filled the home I grew up in — and now my home and the homes of my siblings. We always admired his skill, but only recently did we come to understand the depth of his passion. That’s when we discovered, buried deep inside a storage locker, the meticulous notes, sketches, detailed plans, and even receipts for materials that he kept for his creations. And there were boxes and boxes of the tools to build them, so many tools.
The images in this series honor the creativity and dedication of the craftsman.
