Jack Davison’s dreamy, anachronistic photographs recall the golden age of editorial photography.
One day not long ago, I met the photographer Jack Davison at a café in Brooklyn, during the slow hours of the afternoon. He had been beckoned Stateside from his home in London to do a commercial shoot for Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s luxury fashion line, the Row, but he had spent that day wandering the streets of Chinatown, where, he informed me, he took a lot of great pictures of hands.
The misconception might also have something to do with Davison’s startling youth. Twenty-eight years old, baby-faced and affable, he has been shooting editorial work for the likes of the, and various cultish brands since he was barely out of college; his first monograph, titled simply “Photographs,” was released in May by the London-based imprint Loose Joints.
This anachronistic flavor, Davison explained, is mostly due to his unorthodox photographic education. Raised in rural Essex, in the southeast of England, Davison began making pictures at the age of fifteen. “I just kind of co-opted the family camera, which was a tiny point-and-shoot, and was just, like, ‘I’ll be doing the family photos from now on,’ ” he said.
Critics often make a point of the fact that Davison is self-taught—in college, he studied English literature. But he noted that the characterization is not strictly true. As a teen-ager, through the image-sharing site Flickr, he found a mentor, a street photographer named Brett Walker, who ran a ragtag salon out of his London apartment. “I went down and I started to get my ass kicked,” Davison recalled. “Because he was, like, ‘This is shit, this is wrong.
But, whereas Walker’s work skews toward hard-edged realism, Davison’s has drifted into the realm of dreams. A man’s rain-spattered back becomes a looming edifice that we seem beckoned to scale. A hovering dot painted on an alley wall appears transformed into a luminous moon, propped up by a rusted wire trellis and cradled by a shadow hand, and a wild-eyed dog, all Tic Tac white teeth and blurred fur, is a living incarnation of our rapacious anxieties.
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