David M. Nolan (May 4, 1945-June 1, 2021) was born in Warren, Ohio, and lived much of his life in Danville. He graduated from Southern Illinois University with a degree in geography and a minor in design science, which led to city planning in 1971.
He held city and regional planning positions in Decatur, Warren and Vermilion County between 1972 and 1978. He later worked as a day-treatment counselor for the Danville Manor Nursing Home between 1981 and 1983, and a behavior counselor between 1983 and 2005. In 1974, Nolan returned to Warren to work as a city planner and to assist his father with his trucking company.
While in Ohio, he set up his first darkroom and began teaching photography to disadvantaged youth as well as photographing blues musicians’ performances. When he moved to Danville in 1977, Nolan continued photographing blues performances with his Danville colleague, Jack Van Camp, at Champaign’s Blind Pig. Chris Knight’s bar opened July 27, 1990, and was Champaign’s only dedicated downtown music venue that continually promoted performances seven days a week for eight years.
In 1978, after studying photography with Orvil Stokes, a student of Ansel Adams, who managed the photography department at Carson’s Pharmacy in Danville, Nolan’s interest in photography was rekindled, and he began working as a professional photographer and color-enlargement printer for Danville’s Cunningham Photo Service in 1979. His early professional work was modeled on the Depression-era photographs of Walker Evans. When he was 12 years old, Nolan contracted polio and was given his first camera when he was 13.
When he was 16, he underwent spinal fusion, and during his hospital stay, a volunteer brought him many different books to engage his creative mind. While bound by the physical confines of his wheelchair, he became a voracious reader, and the library’s books and his camera provided boundless opportunities and vistas to explore and experience. According to his wife, Barbara Jean Brenner Nolan, David’s victory over polio taught him quiet patience, which was a hallmark of his demeanor.
Among his many gifts was his ability to listen to others and seek paths for them to excel. He had keen powers of observation and an artist’s eye when capturing the essence of the landscapes and people he photographed. He also believed wheelchairs should never limit one’s passion and creativity as an artist.
Nolan experimented with a variety of different photographic processes. These included cyanotypes, Van Dyke brown prints, black-and-white printing and hand coloring, manipulated and transferred polaroids, liquid light emulsion, and digital photography. Throughout his photographic career, his subjects included landscapes and nature, street scenes, buildings and architecture, nude figure studies, whimsical sculptures, and local and visiting musicians.
His creative manipulation of light and shadow was always guided by the unique humanity and beauty of his subjects. Some of Nolan’s photographic printing techniques required long exposures, usually in excess of 10 minutes, and the finished prints were frequently printed small and intimate as a matter of aesthetic choice. He also often printed his images dark and obscured them with paint, so viewers are required to be active rather than passive discoverers of their visual content.
Beginning in the early 1980s, Nolan began documenting the people and street scenes of Danville. His exhibit “Portraits of Danville: A Photographic Essay” was displayed at the Danville Public Library from May 11-16, 1981, and was the library’s first photographic exhibition. Four years later, Nolan received a grant from the Danville area and Illinois Arts Council to capture, through film, the community life of Vermilion County.
The original title of this documentation project was “People and Culture of Vermilion County — Summer 1985.” The project’s purpose was to visually document people and culture during the summer in Vermilion County. Nolan took this approach, “not because this summer was particularly different from any other summer, but because it was an ordinary summer in one Central Illinois county.
” The project began in Danville on May 4, 1985, and ended in Westville with its Labor Day parade on Sept. 2. The project’s first exhibit, “Vermilion County Document,” was held at Danville’s Art League Building from Oct.
10-12, 1986. Soon after completing his Vermilion project, Nolan was accepted as a participant in Minnesota’s July 12-18, 1987, Split Rock Arts Program Workshops that were part of the 1985-1987 Iron Range Community Documentation project. The project’s purpose was to dispel the negative media portrayals of Minnesota’s Iron Range communities during America’s collapsing steel and iron industries of the 1970s and ’80s.
The project had artists work directly with the people of these communities to document and portray their life stories. The artists’ work was to be published in “Out of the Earth, Like Iron,” in 1991, but the book was never published. However, Nolan’s work on this project continually influenced his photographic work afterward.
After retiring as a day-treatment counselor in 2005, Nolan became a co-curator for Danville’s Alley Gallery, located at 113 N. Vermilion St. The gallery was established in 2006 by Jim and Debbie Crose as an incubator for local artists to exhibit their new works.
As the gallery’s first co-curator, Nolan felt the gallery’s mission was to give local artists exposure and practical experience working in a gallery setting. According to Nolan, he became interested in photography not because of the many opportunities to experiment with different photographic processes but rather for the people he met and experienced through his camera. The gallery’s current display, “David M.
Nolan: A Retrospective,” opened Aug. 3 as a retrospective exhibition of Nolan’s photographs and sculptures. The exhibition is open to the general public Monday-Friday between 9 a.
m. and noon and 1 and 4 p.m.
and by appointment. It will remain open until the end of December. For further information about this exhibit, call 217-497-2293.
For further information about the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music’s David M. Nolan Photographs and Personal Papers, contact Scott Schwartz at either [email protected] or 217-333-4577.
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