MAP6

Afternoon all. This is @marcwilsonphoto  signing off at the end of the day, after taking over the MAP6 Instagram account this week. All set up now at A Bigger Book Fair at @peckham24photo with my books and zines. Opening party this evening, 6 till late. Come down. Have a chat. Buy a book :)

Morning all. This is @marcwilsonphoto  on my last day taking over the MAP6 Instagram account. I’ll be showing all my books and zines at A Bigger Book Fair at @peckham24photo from today to Sunday, including the 4 zines I have published this year. Over the last 16 years of making work I have often made consequential images, on the road, in hotel rooms, places and things I see…seemingly individual but connected often both in their desolation and reference to the places I am on the way to photograph.

Hotel rooms, football pitches, religious symbols, roads, fields. These zines allow me to make smaller bodies of work in a more accesible format and price. On the road One Night In the Shadow On the road 2

This is @marcwilsonphoto  continuing my takeover of the MAP6 Instagram account, today posting from @photolondonfair where I’m showing my books alongside colleagues from @thephotobookclubcollective . My second book made in Ukraine is From ‘Travelogue 2 - A thousand days of longing’. Published in early 2025. For more than 1000 days, since the full-scale russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24th, 2022, I have been sharing work from a more peaceful time, from before the full-scale war, as a small daily reminder and a longing for that life. This book shows a selection of those images, bringing in small fragments of stories - my attempt as a photographer, husband and father to preserve our memories. The book begins in 2018 and ends with a photograph made in March 2022, 18 days after the full scale invasion. “Worlds were turned upside down on that day. Our 4 week old son, our family in Kyiv, our friends throughout the country - everything changed. Lives torn apart. Friends called to arms. Families and lovers torn apart at the border. Friends and colleagues. Murdered by the russian invaders and their rockets, guns, tanks and drones.”

I first travelled to Ukraine in December 2018, on the 18th. That day I met Anna and everything changed. Over the last 7 years we have made 2 books about the country, in response to the full scale invasion by the *ussia. ‘The Land is Yellow, the Sky is Blue’, is centred around Balakliya, a small village in central Ukraine - the homeland of my wife and family. This dual-language book in English and Ukrainian combines the photographs that I made in this place from 2019-2021 with text written in the shadow of the current war. They are stories filled with dreamy childhood memories and an anxiety shaped by the backdrop of war. “My friend Yanyk, with whom as a child I used to race to jump from the cliff into the river, was in the most perilous spots in eastern Ukraine during the full-scale invasion. He suffered from shellshock.” “I will go back to the front line as soon as I recover,” he told me from his hospital bed. “I will fight until we win, until this war is over.” Meanwhile, his wife and two young daughters, sister, niece, and mother are all waiting for him at home. The blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag symbolise the clear blue sky above the fields of wheat that cover our land. In the Ukrainian language, the concept of zemlya or ‘land’ has several meanings. It is the territory and the soil cultivated by the hard work of the people. It is the Motherland.” Anna Nekrasova-Wilson, May 2023 “The war has reached us... and here our boys are already being buried…” Larysa, Balakliya, June 2023 1. Babusya Mariia’s house 2. Balakliya, August 2021 3. Masha 4. July 2020 5. August 2021 6. June 2021

Between 2024 and 2025 I spent many grey and wet days walking through the British landscape making my work The Edge of Ruin. This is the book I am showing this week at Photo London with The Photobook Club Collective. A buried legacy - Marc Wilson On the post industrial landscape of the United Kingdom, the more obvious manifestations of the past crumble away or are erased unless intentionally preserved. What remains is a landscape reshaped by its role in Britain’s industrial history complete with silent markers. Spoil heaps, grassed-over tracks and scarred hillsides all serve as unassuming monuments to our industrial past. Many of the sites are today within national parks or Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, severed from their industrial origins, caught between nature and the ambition of man, photographed with neither nostalgia nor romanticism. Desolate locations that had been underestimated and uninhabited until their riches were exposed: landscapes that were formed by nature and remoulded in the pursuit of power and wealth. The shadows and impressions of the past, seemingly benign places that continue to contaminate our rivers and soils. A landscape tainted by ruthless exploitation of the world we inhabit Printed in a 1st edition of 750 copies, over half are already sold. 1.Hodge Close Quarry, Cumbria 2.Swelltor Quarry, Devon 3.Penrhyn Slate Quarry, Conway 4.Coldberry Lead Mine, Durham

This is @marcwilsonphoto continuing my takeover of the MAP6 Instagram account for this week, sharing photographs taken from some of my books and zines made over the 16 years. Between 2015 and 2021 I worked on my second major long term body of work - A Wounded Landscape - bearing witness to the Holocaust. The work is centred around 22 Holocaust survivor stories (including second and third generation) and is made at over 160 locations throughout Europe. There are nearly 40,000 sites, in Germany and in countries which the Germans occupied between 1939 and 1945. There, the Nazis and their collaborators systematically murdered nearly six million Jews as well as a huge number of people from other groups considered by the Nazis to be inferior, racially or for ideological or political reasons. These groups included Roma, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, and more than three million Soviet prisoners of war. These sites persist today throughout these countries. Together they formed a pathway to genocide: destroyed communities and ghettos, internment camps, transit camps, labour camps, sub-camps, concentration camps, extermination camps and displacement camps. They are connected by the landscapes that surround them, and the forced journeys made between them. At these sites, individual killings and slaughter on a mass scale took place, the numbers involved almost beyond our understanding. These are sites where literal life or death decisions were made, but they are also sites of hope, survival and memory. The book, produced with the help of a Kickstarter campaign that raised over £24,000, has sold 1200 copies of the 1st edition and is held in a number of institutions around the world. 1. Area to right of crematoria, forest camp, Chelmno death camp. Rzuchow forest, Poland. 2015 2. Woods just outside perimeter fence of Natzweiler concentration camp. Struthof, Alsace, France. 2016 3. Rita Weiss. Monday December 4th, 2017 4. Former ghetto site, Mucachevo, Ukraine. December 2018. 5. Disembarkation station in valley below Natzweiler concentration camp. Rothau, Alsace, France. 2016

This is @marcwilsonphoto continuing my takeover of the MAP6 Instagram account for this week, sharing photographs taken from some of my books and zines made over the 16 years. After completing The Last Stand I spent the next 6 years working on ‘A Wounded Landscape - bearing witness to the Holocaust’. During that period I also put together the first of my Travelogue books, made up of photographs taken whilst on the road. ‘Travelogue 1 - Photographs from Eastern Europe 2015-2020’. The book of this work contains 31 photographs and a small story from The territory of the Autonomous territorial unit Transnistria. ‘…They gave strict instructions. Where we could not go. What we could not photograph. What we could not do. How long we could not stay for. …’ The book sold out of it’s 1st edition about 2 year ago, leaving just 15 reserve copies, of which I now have only 2 remaining. 1.Leaving Lviv, Ukraine 2.Mukachevo, Ukraine 3.Lviv, Ukraine 4.On the rails 5.Rivne, Ukraine

This is @marcwilsonphoto taking over the MAP6 Instagram account for the next 5 days, sharing photographs taken from some of my books and zines made over the 16 years, from The Last Stand (published in 2014) right up to my latest zine ‘On the road 2’, published just a few weeks ago. Later this week I’ll be at Photo London and then A Bigger Book Fair in Peckham so do come and say hello if you are there. Documenting memories, histories and stories set in the surrounding landscapes, I work on long-term documentary and topographic projects, sometimes blending 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. My first long term body of work, ‘The Last Stand’ was photographed between 2010 and 2014, and over the four years I travelled 23,000 miles to 143 locations to capture these images along the coastlines of the UK, The Channel Islands, Northern & Western France, Denmark, Belgium and Norway. The photobook of this work, first published in 2014, is now in its 5th print run with almost 5000 copies having been sold. The series aims to reflect the histories and stories military conflict and the memories held in the landscape itself. The series is made up of 86 images and is documents some of the physical remnants of the Second World War on the coastlines of the British Isles and Northern Europe, focusing on military defence structures that remain and their place in the shifting landscape that surrounds them. Many of these locations are no longer in sight, either subsumed or submerged by the changing sands and waters or by more human intervention. At the same time others have re-emerged from their shrouds. 1. Studland Bay I, Dorset, England. 2011 2. Lossiemouth II, Moray, Scotland. 2011 3. Portland, Dorset, England. 2011 4. Newburgh I, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. 2012 5. Sainte-Marguerite-sur-mer, Upper Normandy, France. 2012

We’re delighted to have Marc Wilson as our next Guest Takeover @marcwilsonphoto 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. Marc has published 7 photobooks (and 4 zines) including The Edge of Ruin, The Last Stand, A Wounded Landscape – bearing witness to the Holocaust, and The Land is Yellow, the Sky is Blue. 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.

For this sixth day of the take over we are in Kinsale, to a current body of work started in collaboration with @carmelimeldawalsh It portrays women who swim in the Atlantic during winter. The title references St Brigid. She’s a practical figure—a pagan goddess turned saint, and a protector of women known in the hagiographies for performing early abortions. I’m interested in that history of female agency. There is no performance here. Just the physical reality of the water, a cold anchor in the wilderness of the Celtic Sea.

At the Estuary’s limit is Southend-on-Sea, home to the longest pleasure pier in the world—a 1.3-mile iron line stretching into the Thames. It’s a stubborn marvel, having been crashed into and burnt down, it carries on with its tapestry of locals, day-trippers, and that little train rattling along the side

Today we travel to the Thames Estuary. Linguists argue over where Cockney ends and this “Estuary English” begins—as if a river’s influence has tidy borders. This work documents life along it, from London’s fraying edges to the start of the East Coast. The landscape here is shifting. Industrial prosperity has largely evaporated, leaving behind failed social housing and the quiet weight of what comes next. Small encounters with a community in flux, navigating the literal and social erosion of the riverbanks.