My Life In Politics

"What if campaign signs, badges, bumper stickers and flags aren't simply the ephemera of Americans' political lives, but their substance as well? That this phenomenon finds resonance in photography's arm's length access to its subjects makes My Life in Politics deeply sad and grand at the same time." –Peter Eeley, Frieze magazine

"Mr. Davis aspires to something of Walker Evans's deadpan gaze, his dry wit and laconic curiosity. His photographs, refusing to propagandize, imply a pity for both left and right, a sense that democracy is messy business. . . . But it also reminds us that the camera, by its nature, can lend a curious grace to whatever it sees, no matter how forlorn or marginal." —Michael Kimmelman

In this volume, freedom of expression is exhibited at its most casual, with political, commercial, and populist signage jostling for attention in the social landscape, dissecting the current disenchantment that has become American civic life. Davis's work represents photographic seeing at its finest, meshing careful management of a quotidian palette with an incisive eye for those points at which light bends and refracts, becoming something other than mere illumination.

Tim Davis studied photography at Bard College, and received an MFA from Yale University. His work is in the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. Davis teaches photography at Bard College and is represented in New York by the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery.

Photographs by Tim Davis
Essays by Tim Davis and Jack Hitt
Hardcover
11 1/2 x 9 3/4 inches
112 pages
978-1-59711-011-2
61 four-color images
Spring 2006