JULY 17, 2025
This weekend, the Artists Association of Nantucket will honor New York-based photographer Michael Gaillard at its annual summer gala.
The Nantucket native has devoted countless hours to capturing the landscapes that have surrounded him, namely those from his childhood spent between the rolling hills and rugged coastline of Northern California and the lush island where he was born.
With a bachelorʼs degree and MFA in visual art from Stanford and Columbia, respectively, Gaillardʼs accreditations as a photographer are manifold, having completed projects and been featured in exhibitions both at home and abroad.
He is the first photographer to be honored by the Artists Association at its annual fundraiser.
His passion for photography is deeply seated in his interest in the image and camera as a way of framing critical inquiries into questions of meaning and representation.
His Nantucket landscapes in particular are at once celebrations of the islandʼs beauty – many of them images of beaches, pastures and hidden waterways cast in the fairy-dusted hues of summer – but beyond their sheer beauty and aesthetic value, Gaillardʼs landscapes offer a contemplative realm through which the viewer can access a kind of spiritual exploration that guides them onto an endless pathway of discovery.
As such, his work brings beauty and questions about social interaction and the human subject into productive and complicated conversation.
“Most landscapes I produce carry social significance only insofar as they might create a new way of seeing landscape and beauty, elicit a meditative reverie and ideally compel some sense of responsibility toward the protection and preservation of that which it captures,” he said.
“But I would also say that my time in the landscape behind the camera is often a very personal, even spiritual endeavor, and the landscapes that result from that time are evidence of that rather than objects with a specific message or agenda. Ideally they are jumping-off points for the viewerʼs own reflection, either inward or outward, growing and evolving with them as time passes, because oneʼs perspective is always changing.”
Though Gaillardʼs oeuvre has often been praised for its painterly qualities, the Artists Associationʼs decision to honor him is a move that might highlight these more pressing aspects of his work: the importance of mobilizing art and creativity as tools for critically engaging with our surroundings in a world that seems more and more on the brink of collapse, and the need for humans to reconsider and reconceptualize our relationship to our environment in order to play an active role in reimagining these relations on the basis of sustainability.
Much of Gaillardʼs dedication to photography rests in his belief in its symbolic import: in the capacity for photos to challenge viewers to cultivate and deepen their understanding of self, time and place.
“I think the best landscape images made in the vein of my Nantucket works provide an opportunity for meditation and reflection that impact the viewerʼs life as the weather might, changing and growing with them as opposed to being a static extraction of a singular moment,” he said.
“I have always liked the idea of photography as a means to isolate symbols that stand for something else. Whereas a metaphor has more intention and even creative artifice behind it, I feel as though I discover things in the landscape that stand in for something bigger, without explicitly telling the viewer what that relationship is, nor how it should be interpreted. That discovery lends agency to the content and in a way that allows me, the artist, to recede more than the isolation and presentation of a metaphor might.”
Gaillardʼs relationship to Nantucket – and to photography – has continued to evolve over the course of his career. More recently, this evolution was felt in his decision to visit Los Angeles to encounter with his camera the devastation wrought by the wildfires this past January.
“LA was the first time Iʼve ever felt the impulse, the urge, the obligation to respond to any sort of newsworthy event. Thatʼs just not the way Iʼve used the camera in the past. Iʼve always had a complicated relationship with the whole medium of journalistic photography, because I feel as though itʼs so impacted and manipulated by the context in which itʼs placed,” he said.
Despite his tangled relationship to journalistic photography, Gaillard has always been interested in addressing this “slippery,” as he says, quality of the photograph: the complicated relationship between reality and representation, and the space between truth and illusion.
“I donʼt believe a picture tells a thousand words. A picture can justify or validate a thousand words, but the language (a photograph) speaks is so much less precise and more open to interpretation, but really giving the illusion of truth, doing more to obscure than to reveal,” he said.
Hours spent honing in on technique and his relationship with the camera prepared Gaillard for his encounters in Los Angeles.
“I see (time spent) in the landscape as an opportunity to develop and refine techniques that can then be applied in contexts where the goal might be completely different. This is about the physical, tangible relationship to the device and the technology, and the way to translate lived experience into form, into representation. I value that as essential, as part of my life and as part of my practice,” he said.
“Professional athletes practice constantly to perform at the highest level when theyʼre in a game, and any professional athlete that has reached the height of their powers would say that they still shoot a thousand shots a day. I have no reason to believe that thereʼs any difference with my art practice.”
“So, these past couple years, Iʼve made more images and worked more on my practice than ever before, and Iʼve finally managed to unify my understanding of what I do where every aspect of the practice contributes to the greater whole.”
“In Los Angeles, all the tools I had at my disposal were employed in that moment, a moment I felt very strongly about,” Gaillard said.
His pull to Los Angeles recalls the impulse to inhabit intersections between man and nature, beautification and decay and the “conflicts that arise between the two” that has time and again proven central to his work.
This collision between man and nature is also evident in a photograph Gaillard took of a channel marker that washed ashore in Squam several years ago.
“I heard about this from a friend and flew back to Nantucket specifically to photograph it. At the time I had never heard of something like that happening. Itʼs happened two more times since. Ironically, that is likely a consequence of the rising intensity of storms and the very climate crisis I believe the piece speaks to,” he said.
In the photo, Gaillard makes a shocking albeit intriguing formal decision to set the buoy vertically in relation to the viewer within the frame. The result is a visceral feeling of being dwarfed by the massive object which, rusted and beached on its side, itself suggests the undergoing of a kind of death and mechanical decay.
“Iʼve always been interested in the aesthetic of decay as a vehicle for considering our fragility but also our culpability,” Gaillard said.
In his move to place the viewer and gargantuan object in direct conversation, Gaillardʼs photograph conditions an encounter with both the struggle between man and nature and our very culpability in this cycle.
Beyond Los Angeles and Nantucket, recent travels have furnished Gaillardʼs approach to both photography and the island that he grew up on.
In his return to Nantucket this summer, Gaillard has begun to see the island as a microcosm for a larger world of issues and social structures that extend far beyond its coastline.
“Iʼve recently returned to the island with a newfound clarity after the past couple years of travel (to the big island of Hawaii for an extensive commission, to Iceland for a month-long artistʼs residency, and to California). On these trips my time behind the camera was more concentrated and intense than ever before,” he said.
“As such, my return to Nantucket has compelled me to see it in a different light. To see it as a symbol of so much more, so much that we are contending with and will continue to contend with as we hurtle into an uncertain and perilous period for humanity and our time on Earth.”
For Gaillard, being honored by the Artists Association comes at a moment of appreciation for the role Nantucket has played in his career.
“Itʼs interesting to be getting this award at this moment in my life, where I feel as though, for the first time, Iʼve found the balance I was seeking,” he said. “The way I found this balance was by embracing the role Nantucket has played, not just in my sustenance, but also in my creative identity. Thereʼs always been this decision I faced, which is that feeling that going home is the easy choice, and that elsewhere was unknown, that elsewhere was the circuitous route, that it would involve discovery and growth that wouldnʼt be possible at home. I went on this route, I went far, and Iʼve come back to this embrace thatʼs felt more personal than it ever has before.”
“Youʼre born into a place and you donʼt have a lot of control over that. I hadnʼt defined my relationship to Nantucket on my own terms yet. And now, I feel like Iʼm finally doing that.”
Gaillard is currently based in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., where he enjoys his life with his wife and two sons.
Further information on his practice and access to his work can be found on his website, https://www.michaelgaillard.com/
Quinn Frankel is a Nantucket-based freelance writer originally from Los Angeles, Calif.. She received her bachelorʼs degree in art history from Brown University in 2020 and recently completed her masterʼs degree in cultural sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is an avid surfer and musician who loves to be in the ocean and play music in her spare time.