CANDELAR FEATURE: MARCH
MARCH 2026: Wes Bell
March Candelar page featuring Bell’s image, Not Whole - #2, 2024
Wes Bell was born and raised in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. He received a Diploma in Visual Communications - Photography at the Alberta College of Art. He later received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the Alberta University of the Arts.
His fashion photographs have appeared in publications such as British GQ, Conde Nast Traveler, The New York Times Magazine and People. Celebrity portraits include actors Channing Tatum and Olivia Wilde as well as movie director and fashion designer Tom Ford.
In 2014, after residing in New York for over two decades, Wes returned to Alberta. Today, he focuses on art photography, deploying his square medium format film camera, and photographing outdoors on location. Wes' analog hand-printed gelatin silver photographs have been widely exhibited internationally, including the recent Oil - Beauty and Horror in the Petrol Age at Germany's Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and closer to home, Rapt and Callus, a solo exhibition at Contemporary Calgary for the Exposure 2022 Photography Festival. He is currently working on a photobook project called On The Line.
NOT WHOLE began with a familiar timeworn wooden fence surrounding an empty lot in a nearby back alley, a fence that, for reasons I didn’t yet understand, kept drawing me back. Under the piercing summer sun, the bare, fractured planks revealed knot holes in varying stages of decay: some partially intact, others eroded, and many gone entirely. I began photographing them as the season turned to autumn, its long, sharp light and deep shadows stretching across the surface.
A few months later, visiting my father in his long-term care home, I opened the secured entry door and came face-to-face with an older woman in a wheelchair, wearing a nighty and housecoat, her hair in disarray. My gaze fell on her amputated leg, exposed just below the knee. She was going outside for a smoke, a cigarette clenched in her bony, bruised hand, a small gesture framed by a void. The hollowed sockets of her eyes, the lines of her face, and the missing leg echoed the holes in the fence, each opening worn and shaped over years. Her body bore absence, and yet around me the hallways held another kind entirely, memory and the self, splintering and disappearing over time.
The fence, like the residence’s secured entrance, suggested protection and separation, a stark boundary marking inside and outside. The knot holes revealed something broken, missing, or unfinished, in the material world or within the self, the strange, bifurcated world of beauty and brutality. NOT WHOLE reflects on visible and invisible absences, a meditation on ambiguous loss: the kind that leaves presence within absence, where what is missing is not entirely gone.
Introduced in 2022, the Candelar is a limited edition set of fine art photographic calendar cards juried through a free one-week open call. The Candelar card sets, printed in-house on Hahnemühle paper by Candela Photographic Arts, can be displayed pinned, clipped, framed, or propped.
