Illilluminations
In Illilluminations I am photographing grand and gorgeous failures of light to sync up to its supposed functions: Braille billboards, odd elaborate shadows behind figurative sculptures, spring pear blossoms arc lit into oblivion, neon cones to no one.
I am interested in light that obscures as it illumines, that overstates and overblows, and in some cases, that fails to appear at all. You can sift through any photographer’s amassed images and find moments when the light shifts from something that describes to something that is described; moments when the photographer has seen–or better, understood — the light.
Searchlights
Bad Bulbs
Empire State Flashes
Car Accident
Bradford Pear
Hydroponics
Bag
Box Props
Lightbulb Shop Window
Museum Pieces
Overhead Projector
Sconce
Statue and Van
White Tiger
Banjo
Braille Billboard
Chandelier
Flowering Tree
Mirror Ball
Spangled Bag
Illilluminations
An Essay By Tim Davis
The classicists who write photography textbooks dutifully translate “photography” from the Greek as “light writing.”
It was Cervantes who saw translation as “the back side of a tapestry,” and in the case of photography’s many translators, most have been staring at the wall. In photographic language, light is read as grammar; as an aesthetic tool, helping the artist describe an apprehended visual world. I am pursuing a visual world where light is syntactic; light veering close to content. In all my work light is cultural and political. It is put there by someone, for a purpose: to invite citizens to share their money with corporations, to keep workers working, to describe democracy, to allow paintings in museums to be seen in one particular way.
In Illilluminations I am photographing grand and gorgeous failures of light to sync up to its supposed functions: Braille billboards, odd elaborate shadows behind figurative sculptures, spring pear blossoms arc lit into oblivion, neon koans to no one. I am interested in light that obscures as it illumines, that overstates and overblows, and in some cases, that fails to appear at all. You can sift through any photographer’s amassed images and find moments when the light shifts from something that describes to something that is described; moments when the photographer has seen–or better—understood the light.
As a child I used to walk up a drumlin in Amherst, Mass. to look at the stars. Over time it became obvious that the beauty I saw in them was learned. The lights flickering through the valley below were much more beautiful than the ones in the sky: they backed up, they changed color, they disappeared. They strived to illuminate the world, but from that distance, were all that was illumined. They were beautiful failures, while the stars were old saws with great P.R.—bands that could pack stadiums on the reputation of a few antique hits. Both circumstances interest me now, and Illilluminations is an attempt to stretch a body of work to incorporate beautiful failures and lapsed beauties, ways light can back up into really meaning.
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In his latest series, “Illilluminations,” light doesn’t reveal so much as strip, desensitize, and ultimately obscure; airport scanners flay handbags, neon signs compete with reflected sunsets, and searchlights crown a drab block in South Jersey (pictured) in a discomfiting conflation of the Towers of Light memorial and the cinematically contrived suburbia of Gregory Crewdson. Careering from portrait to still life to landscape, and from small- to large-scale, Davis flouts the modern collector’s preference for a coherent group of supersize prints with a clear narrative. He’s also turning a critical eye on the language of photography.
—New York Magazine