DOMINIC DAVIES

The first impression we get when we see Dominic Davies’s photographs is that his images are as engrossing as a detective novel full of clues. Each photograph is like a short film condensed into a single image. But mean while what has taken place in these strange environments is left deliberately unclear. His images are tempting because they give the illusion that it might be possible to pick up, examine and rearrange the items in front of us. His interiors are ultimately more than just glimpses into a different time and place.
For example, his image of a pair of red glittery high heels also includes various items from the past. Glamorous footwear like this is often seen as the ultimate object of desire for young women who hope these shoes will have magical qualities that will allow the wearer to go “else where” like Dorothy’s shoes in The Wizard of Oz. In his fascinating photograph we see not only Davies’ version of the Marilyn Monroe’s shoes and the diminutive figures of John F Kennedy and Jackie Onassis, but also tiny numbered labels attached to objects and wires which criss cross this “crime scene”. Davies makes it seem as if the photograph could come to life at any moment and that invisible strings could be pulled to create an automated peep show. This Alice-in –Wonderland distortions of scale suggest that this is a fantasy world, but hints that the past can be investigated and some kind of truth unearthed.

Davies’ images seduce us into believing we could solve a troubling unsolved mystery some forty years later (because, for instance, we are still learning new facts about particular assassinations, a possible love affair and a suicide). Perhaps these red shoes are the illusionary but longed for objects which “make things happen “. Reminiscent of Cinderella’s glass slippers that fit perfectly- they seem to belong to you already… they were “meant to be “. These shoes will take their owner to a place where she will be forever safe and loved with one click of her heels.

Davies photographs are replete with meaning. There are so many stories top tell about each of these unusual scenarios. They include references to iconic images taken from 1940s films, hard-boiled crime novels, real life political drama, as well as cult of celebrity, all the while hinting at some underlying obsessive behaviour. In this particular shot the various threads serve as straight lines of thought which emphasise the illusion of three-dimensional space. They imply that in looking there is no confusion and offer the illusion that rational, unperturbed analysis can maintain a hold on what is ultimately knowable. Perhaps unresolved dramas from the past are unsettling because, despite sophisticated technology, both artificial and human intelligence, and even DNA analysis, most crimes remain unsolved. In a reassuring way, the visible lines in this photograph also seem to pin down the troubling inconsistencies of historical fact. However despite the fact that we know this, we remain aware that we can only ever unravel our own motives and desires and not the dramatic events surrounding the public figures in the past.

Although Davies states that he is mainly inspired by locations, he is fascinated by accounts of psychological aberrations and seeks to explore what he describes as “ the slightly neurotic need for control”. He was quiet inspired by the Oliver sacks book “The man who mistook his wife for a hat “ “There’s a true story of a Japanese man who only stole red things and these pictures drop into my head. They sit there until they aggravate me enough to make a picture”. Davies has installed various red items into an ugly 1980s brown tilled bathroom to suggest the empty life of the kleptomaniac, and the notion that perhaps the neurologist are the detectives of our emotional lives Davies is skilled at making serendipitous connections between quiet distinct disciplines. He is often attached to strange places, and notes, “ I’ve been looking at crime scenes images and their function wasn’t aesthetic. Thing were marked out “ Although he sees his photograph of a car interior as more serious than his other photographs and possibly a bit morbid, the appearance of red plastic balls suggests something quite bizarre has taken place. This carefully arrange d image suggests that this is how police arriving at the scene first saw it but the but the viewer comes upon these imaginary scenes totally unprepared for their compelling oddity.

Although Davies claims that he wants to be in total control of the image, he also paradoxically “ likes the chaotic “ and is fascinated but=y the unexpected. “In the Sack’s book a man touches textures all the time. I can relate to that because everything I see is a potential picture; from the texture of a rug, to the cinema. I don’t know why the stories appeal, but the more work you do the more you see”.

Davies works on both commercial projects and his own pieces. However, he doesn’t feel confined by his commissioned work. The cover for Frozen Beauties, a book about Japanese film stills, illustrates how he can turn a domestic space into what look like a theatre stage. In one photo, the wooden kitchen appears to have been transformed into a shrine to film stars by an imaginary inhabitant, creating “home made environment” that is dense in longing. Here photographs of cinematic heroes and heroines are not only glued to the table and walls but are also balanced on wires. Fandom appears both obsessional and compulsive a two dimensional portrait of the interior of some ones mind.

In the “Golf widow”, which Davies describes as an “a bit more comical”, the golf clubs standing on a pink carpet are reminiscent of the kitchen implements in Disney’s Fantasia. We can imagine these gadgets coming to life like Disney’s animated broomstick dancing to increasingly wild music. Such Anthropomorphic tendencies are prevalent through out Davies work and reveal his rare ability to visualize what may be happening insider people’s heads. What Davies does is help us imagine characters that don’t really exist so that we temporarily become detectives or psychoanalysts concerned with uncovering strange truths. There is no definitive answer about what can be discovered in these images but they lead us in so many different directions that the experience of looking at (and thinking about) Davies’ extraordinary work remains intensely pleasurable.

© Siobhan Wall

By Siobhan Wall from EYEMAZING MAGAZINE

There is a surreal story about the city of Düsseldorf during the Second World War. The heavy and inaccurate bombardment of the city resulted in decimation of parts of the zoo, allowing certain animals to roam freely beyond the boundaries of their cages and even the containment of the zoo itself. Imagine, amidst the fear of what must have felt like indiscriminate enemy air attacks, the added concern about wild animals appearing on urban street corners. It conjures mental images of giraffes loping down tar macadam strasse, polar bears and Gentoo penguins basking on traffic islands, Indian elephants and okapi feeding on grass verges, with ring-tailed lemurs and capuchin monkeys ruminating in trees overhead.

This tale of Pythonesque chaos intrigues me because the idea of these animals wandering around a sophisticated European city seems wonderfully incongruous to someone who grew up in Africa. I was used to elephants wandering at night through the farm and one of the games we would play on long car journeys was ‘first one to spot a ...’. The aim was to be the first to spy a giraffe, kudu, rhino or one of the many wild animals that fed along the edges of the thin asphalt and dirt-track roads. My brother and I accepted the animals as a part of the landscape, awesome, beautiful and tinged with a frisson of danger. By the time I came to Europe as a teenager, the melancholy of growing up included the knowledge that the romance of those early years had kept us from the realities of dwindling species and the devastation of natural habitats.
Dominic Davies’ series of photographs alludes to such inherent inconsistencies in modern zoology. His images utilise an unsettling visual device which approximates to a form of selective myopia. He has photographed zoos around the world through a lens, which seems to have tunnel vision or the limited sight of an unsophisticated animal. The cages appear through a swirling vortex of blurred light, seen with destabilised eyes in a manner quite contrary the precise perspective, which the geometrical optics of the camera mechanically presents. They recall the paintings of Turner in the 1840s in which the luminescence of the sun was represented in bold swirls of abstract colour. Davies undermines the camera’s linear optical system with its inflexible identification of perception and object. That transformation of subject into object is mediated by theatre. Whilst his images are photographic and hence are not entirely severed from their subject, they do circumvent the purely indexical relationship inherent in industrialised image making. The composition, framing and Cartesian perspective is absorbed into a visually disorienting haze, a phantasmagoric blur which interrupts mimetic reproduction. In representation the blur dispossess the subject of its coordinates, unpicking the eye’s privileged position. The photographs appear roughly hewn and the link of vision with pure synchronous presence is broken. They become coded and emotive presentations of reality with greater focus on the process of perception which highlights zoos as attractions engineered toward visual consumption by a paying audience.

The zoos appear to be fundamentally false environments and these are pictures of stage sets. In some cases the photographs are of the simple illuminated cage, with the stage lights supplying both the animals’ heating and the resource which facilitates the audiences’ sight. Davies’ visual distortions represent architecture which is unnatural and alienating and the animals appear as playthings in a voyeuristic vortex. The viewer’s perception of scale is disturbed such that the stages appear minuscule and child-like, emphasising the psychological as well as physical caging. Unsurprisingly bars are rarely present in modern zoos, due to their negative connotations as symbols of restraint. There are few bars in Davies’ images; more often the means of containment is in the form of brushed aluminium and plate glass with consumer friendly corners. At the beginning of the twentieth century Carl Hagenbeck revolutionised exhibition philosophy in zoos with his panoramic display of animals on simulated terrain such as rockscapes or hills. These simulations have resulted in highly creative recreations of natural habitats but in Davies’ photographs these landscapes bring to mind Desmond Morris’ aphorism that the city is not a concrete jungle but it is a human zoo. Animal zoos can be seen in converse terms because most consist of jungle cast out of concrete. Such Hagenbeckian naturalism is distinct from designs like that by Bertold Lubetkin of the Penguin Pool at the London zoo in which the dramatic stage for the displayed animals involves the theatrical juxtaposition of audience and performers. Whatever the specific design approach in attempting to rationalise or exaggerate the spectacle, Davies’ photographs have the effect of emphasising the isolation of the cages and the fundamental fact of the human domination, control and consumption of the lower orders of the animal kingdom.

Essay by MICHAEL MACK from 'TO CAGE'