“There’s eyes in the exhibition. There’s hands, dogs, still lifes,” says Jack Davison, relaying some of the motifs that appear in his new show at London’s Cob Gallery. “I never think I’m doing the same things, but as a photographer you do repeat things.” Three years on from the release of his first monograph (Photographs, published by Loose Joints and currently in its third reissue), Photographic Etchings, his debut UK solo show proper, resumes the photographer’s visually erratic approach to curation with 33 standalone images from his archive. “I wanted the book to be a manifesto,” he says, “to show the randomness of the imagery, linked only by my eye and the way I see things. It’s the same with the exhibition. There’s no footnotes, the images are linked by the process.”
Born in Essex and based in London, in 2014 Jack was named a “One to Watch” by the British Journal of Photography, since championed by the wider industry for his distinctive approach to image-making. When we speak over Zoom, he’s just returned from a rare fashion week stint in Paris, shooting his long-time collaborator Ib Kamara’s first Off-White show as the brand’s Image and Art Director. “I like being in slightly chaotic situations because it’s about being reactionary,” he tells me. “And the show was amazing, what Ib is doing is special.” The exhibition meanwhile, in the works for over a year, arrives with its own sense of chaos, informed by the photographer’s personal approach, having hand-printed the entire catalogue himself.
“I always feel it’s cheating, getting people to come and see your pictures if you haven’t done anything to them, or been involved,” he says. “People consume so much imagery through phones and laptops that I wanted to focus on making something that was interesting to see, different texturally.” Working both in colour and black-and-white, the images in the show assume the latter, produced via methods of chiaroscuro (an Italian term which literally means ‘light-dark’), framing and exposure as instruments of abstraction, inspired by a printing course he undertook in Brighton. “I’ve always loved ink as a medium, since GCSE art. And this process is really hands on,” he continues. “As soon as you start throwing ink into the mix, and inexperienced hands, each thing feels different and special. It’s adding layers of texture, and a slight risk.”
This incredibly IRL format is likewise significant for the photographer, who initially found his creative community online, particularly in digital spaces like Flickr. “There was a John Deakin exhibition that really changed my mind and made me start thinking about the physicalness of a print,” he says, recalling how the late photographer — a friend of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon — shaped his own attitude towards displaying photography. “He was a photographer who hated that he wasn’t an artist and treated his photography with contempt, leaving prints all over the studio floor. They were walked on and dog-eared, but seeing them [at The Photographers’ Gallery in 2014] was transformative.” Keen to communicate a human touch in his own work, albeit with a higher regard for the practice itself, Jack’s work is the product of making — and perhaps more specifically, embracing — mistakes.
Self-taught — he began taking photographs in his mid-teens but opted to study English Literature at university, maintaining his practice throughout his degree — Jack only realised that photography could be a career following the advice of a tutor who, seeing his misplaced energy, likened photography to his ‘mistress’, with English literature his ‘honest wife’. “I had no idea of routes into the industry, I just knew that I loved photography. So I knocked on doors, which seems quite shocking now,” he says. “There’s something powerful about going and seeing people. It’s less scary to send an email, but again it boils down to showing physical things. I came to London in 2014/15 and had a massive book of photographs. It was probably nonsensical, but I went and met people, some of whom I’ve stayed in touch with.”
Today the photographer carries four cameras at all times, and has published a further two books, collaborating with Marni on Song Flowers and studying rhinos in Kenya for Ol Pejeta (an annotated version of Photographs also exists). Asked to summarise what he does, he shares that ultimately it’s about looking for light. “I live in England, that’s why it’s so precious. If I grew up in LA I wouldn’t be as obsessed with looking for light — here it’s a rarity. You’re looking for a beam of sunlight on a cloudy day that could lift a picture,” he says. “It’s about playfulness and experimenting, finding those moments I don’t have control over. My great worry is it becoming stale, but I love its transformative power. Photographing something and it becoming something else, or it having different meanings for other people. Just shaping things and playing with imagination.”
‘Photographic Etchings’ is on at Cob Gallery 7th October – 12th November 2022.
Credits
All images courtesy of Jack Davison and Cob Gallery