Nathan Olsen





Work
Info




Info

Projects:
Touchstone

Zines:
Graphics


Nathan Olsen is a self-taught photographer exploring moments of slow attention. His photographs depict personal experiences that reflect on identity, belonging, and spirituality.

Nathan was a recipient of the Creator Labs Photo Fund in 2024.

email
@nathanolsen2026


Graphics

A sense of loneliness can be detected in Graphics, a zine series created using the artist’s disparate archival material. The pages alternate between abstract, personless views and shadowy, obscured figures. In these images, people, objects, and landscapes seem to disintegrate across the page, leaving the viewer to question the meaning of the title. Are these images simply about shape and line, or do they suggest an attitude of derealization towards their contents?

Printed using a risograph machine, the ongoing series is an excercise in stripping images down to their raw materials, reinterpreting their use cases, and weaving images made using different mediums into a cohesive narrative.



Touchstone

“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 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