Bio:
Steve Davis is a documentary portrait and landscape photographer based in the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared in American Photo, Harper's, the New York Times Magazine, Russian Esquire, and is in many collections, including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Seattle Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the George Eastman Museum. He is a 1st place recipient of the Santa Fe CENTER Project Competition, and two time winner of the Washington Arts Commission/Artist Trust Fellowship . Davis is the former Coordinator of Photography at The Evergreen State College, and currently teaches photography at South Puget Sound Community College. He is represented by the James Harris Gallery, Seattle.
Artist Statement:
Over the past several years, much of my work has centered on themes of community and transformation in the face of abandonment and imprisonment- for reasons of crime, bad luck, or nature. With these subjects, I strive to put faces and a sense of individual humanity in populations that our culture often defines by location surroundings and assumptions of character and functionality. Out of respect, I tend to create portraits as formal compositions, deserving of consideration and reflection, both in the present and future.
I see my artistic trajectory originating toward the faces of change, as governed by external, often unpleasant forces. Transitioning forward, I seek the faces and locations that suggest greater personal control in lives that speak through voices of free will and a potentially optimistic future.
Influences reflected in the work presented include German photographer August Sander, American fashion photographer Richard Avedon, and Alphonse Bertillon, chief of criminal identification for the Paris police, who created the modern identification system of the “mug shot” in the late 1800s.