DC Wilkes

After decades of success in international real estate law, in my 40s I have returned to and am thriving in my earliest passion: making fine art. Though I started out in my teens as a painter, I have now discovered film photography and the darkroom as a means to express and share turning points in my early life that formed and informed the way that I am and how I react to circumstances today.

Most are connected with nostalgia for 1970s Manhattan, where I was born, as well as traumatic losses and jolts I experienced before I was ten years old. Things happened in my childhood often seemingly by surprise and often went horribly wrong, leaving scars that are deep. I have long ignored these moments. Like a writer or an actor, I can recreate with photographs in a way that speaks to me.

And while my childhood memories are my own, they seem to resonate with others. Because the way we are, the way we are being at any given moment, is based on the underlying hard wiring that impressed itself on our brain through events when we were young: and so I am determined to “see” those events again. It’s quite possible that my memory has transformed them, and that's okay.

I also avidly enjoy rock and ice climbing, piloting an airplane, and mountaineering, all of which occasionally finds a place in my work.