Touchstone
2023 - present

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This project is an expression of longing: to understand how a town I had never been to shaped my identity, to connect with distant relatives, and to make sense of my ancestral past. Touchstone investigates land passed down through generations - a link between distant family members - and its role in preserving family history.

“Santa Maria del Oro is tucked into the western Mexican state of Jalisco. The Chicago-based photographer Nathan Olsen first visited his ancestral town to see family, and for the Catholic Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe celebration, but his exploration soon turned inward, prompting a deeper search. Olsen’s series Touchstone is an attempt to make meaning from the fragments of his mixed ancestry; the title refers to a black siliceous stone used to test the purity of metals, as well as the history of rich deposits of gold in the region. It also functions as a metaphor for his own mixed-race background. ‘Photographing and spending time in Santa Maria del Oro literally widens the idea of where I come from in a physical and spiritual sense,’ says Olsen. His soft black-and-white images, captured with a view camera, give the impression of a place still crystalizing into memory—landscapes and tender domestic scenes where people are barely visible, or facing away. They are hands reaching both ways into time. As Olsen explains: ‘Exploring the land is an exploration of self.’”

-Eli Cohen and Varun Nayar, Aperture

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