Second Place Award of Excellence

16 and Under/ Takeover:  Small-Scale Works by Members of 
The San Diego Museum of Art Artists Guild

Live at SHIFT Gallery, 4847 Newport Avenue, OCEAN BEACH 
November 3 – December 17, 2026
Online through December 2024: www.sdmaag.org
Juror:  BARBARA SEXTON
Artist/Professor of Fine Art, San Diego Mesa College (ret.)
 

Congratulations to our 
Second Place Award of Excellence Winner  
Will Gibson
 
Will was awarded the second place for his 
Platinum/Palladium Photograph Passages.
About Will:
After spending seven years in medical research, Will Gibson turned his photographic hobby into a vocation in 1979. He opened his own studio a year later. By 1999, the business was a full-service commercial studio with a full wet lab and one-stop desktop publishing. What followed next was a three-year sojourn based in Columbus, Ohio, where he concentrated on his personal photography, traveling the art fair circuit all over the American east.

Returning to Escondido, California, Gibson began teaching photography at Palomar College, and later also at UCSD Extension. During the next fifteen years he taught fifteen separate class titles, including Alternative Processes, Portraiture and Commercial Photography. He continued to exhibit his work in group and one-man shows, was a founding member of the PhotoArts Group in Escondido, co-produced six Best of Nature shows at the San Diego Natural History Museum and has been a speaker and juror in photo clubs in the greater San Diego area. 

Gibson is currently showing his varied work in his Escondido studio and exploring wet-plate collodion and digital infrared photography.

About Passages:  Passages (and “Three Doors”) were photographed in Pueblo Bonito, 
Chaco Culture National Historic Park in New Mexico. Chaco Canyon was the center of the 
early Puebloan culture (Anasazi) between roughly 850 and 1150 AD. This view captures 
many of the unique features of this amazing structure. It was captured on film and printed in platinum/palladium on hand coated Arches Platinum paper. This process originated in 1873 as platinum printing. Palladium was an added option later. Commercially available coated papers were available until the first world war commandeered the supply of platinum. A revival of the process came in the late 1970’s and has continued where practitioners now coat their own papers and process the images by hand.

Website:  www.willgibsonphoto.com