Tim Davis: My Life in Politics - Hardcover

Hitt, Jack

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1597110116 ISBN 13: 9781597110112

Publisher: Aperture, 2006

Synopsis

This first in-depth publication of photographer Tim Davis's work dissects the disenchantment and dissociation that have come to dominate American civil life. It is Davis's treatise on the state of contemporary politics, politics as an aestheticized banality abstracted from real issues of power. He finds freedom of expression exhibited at its most casual and cursory, with political, commercial and populist signage jostling for space and attention in the social landscape: His documentation of that landscape, as Peter Eeley of Frieze magazine interprets it, asks, "What if campaign signs, badges, bumper stickers and flags aren't simply the ephemera of Americans' political lives, but their substance as well?" My Life in Politics represents photographic seeing at its finest and most subtle. Davis continues Stephen Shore's colorist tradition, meshing the careful management of a quotidian palette with an incisive eye for those points at which light bends and refracts, becoming something other than mere illumination.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

It can be hard to tell if Davis's collection of portraits of political activists, office holders and campaign iconography is art photography masquerading as documentary journalism or the other way around. Davis, a graduate of Yale's prestigious M.F.A. program, evinces some affinity with the photographic styles of well-known Yale faculty—the melancholic gazes of Philip-Lorca diCorcia's subjects and the eerie lighting of Gregory Crewdson's suburbia. Nearly all of the images are overtly political, but it would be a mistake to read them as entirely journalistic and ignore their lush colors and calibrated proportions. The most successful ones keep obvious political references at arm's length and instead show off Davis's formal techniques—the reflective glare that obscures a politician's face in a painted portrait, or the shiny abstraction of oozing purple droplets in a puddle of oil. There are moments in this collection when the relentless theme treads dangerously close to cliché or sounds a heavy-handed note of cynicism. But rather than the predictable arguments one might expect from an avowedly liberal undertaking, the series succeeds in presenting pleasurable surprises and deeply poignant moments, offering a significant contribution to the art of American documentary photography. (May)
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Review

"...rather than the predictable arguments one might expect from an avowedly liberal undertaking, the series succeeds in presenting pleasurable surprises and deeply poignant moments, offering a significant contribution to the art of American documentary photography." -- Publisher's Weekly

"...Davis offers us a scabrous visual critique of all that is most hollow about 21st century political discourse -- from a row of television screens showing repeated images of a sloganeering George W Bush through bored-looking telephone canvassers tapping lazily on their keyboards to empty-eyed protesters queuing at an HSBC cash-point." -- James Morrison --Ei8ht Magazine Ei8ht Magazine

"Davis has a good eye and documents our political freedoms on the streets, in offices, and the random spaces of America's landscape." --Focus: Fine Art Photography Magazine

Edition details

• Publisher: Aperture
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1597110116
• ISBN 13: 9781597110112
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 112