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May 10, 2025 — June 7, 2025
EL INDIO DE TIJUANA — Marshall Williams
A dual exhibition featuring distinctive night photography from two unique perspectives. Marshall Williams explores roadside taco stands throughout Southern California during twilight hours, while Philipp Scholz Rittermann documents the NASSCO shipyard in San Diego, including the construction of the Exxon Valdez.
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Marshall Williams (b. 1965) was born and raised in Santa Barbara, California. He credits many influences for his early interest in photography, including family friends who were photographers, his father's camera, and an awareness of the famed Brooks Institute. Upon graduating from Brooks in 1990, Williams took a position as studio manager and assistant to renowned photographer Dean Collins in San Diego. His fine art images favor black-and-white for its timelessness, crediting Max Yavno's luminous prints as highly inspirational.
I set out to make photographs of the roadside taco stand, a ubiquitous fixture—commonplace in the context of the Southern California Landscape. In daylight, these small structures are swallowed by their surroundings, but in the early evening they are cloaked in a subdued ambiance, emitting their own light, exuding a sort of theatrical like presence. Through this lens, what initially appears ordinary reveals unexpected depth—these structures possess complexity and individuality, functioning as portraits reflecting human creativity and personality.
Philipp Scholz Rittermann was born in 1955 in Lima, Perú, and moved to Germany in 1969. In the mid-seventies, he co-founded Galerie Novum and taught photography in Hannover, emigrating to the United States at the end of 1982.
His photographs are included in more than 100 public, private, and corporate collections, including MoMA, New York; SFMoMA; and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. A mid-career survey of Rittermann's work was held at the Museum of Photographic Arts San Diego, and Emperor's River was presented at MCASD.
For over four decades, Rittermann has documented art for artists, collectors, and major institutions in Southern California and across the nation. He also teaches photography and serves on the boards of several arts organizations.
I gained access to San Diego's NASSCO shipyard from 1985 for approximately 18 months. The industrial setting at night captivated me, particularly the glow and activity surrounding two major shipbuilding projects: the hospital ship Mercy and the Exxon Valdez. I observed the future tanker's single-walled hull design firsthand. Three years after launching, the Exxon Valdez caused the largest crude oil spill in U.S. waters at that time, killing hundreds of thousands of animals and prompting the landmark Oil Pollution Act of 1990. While the images haven't changed since I made them, the way I feel about them has.
