Tim Davis: I’m Looking Through You

I’m Looking Through You is an expansive visual poem celebrating the glamorous surface of Los Angeles and its reach. Animating Tim Davis's wry observations and the mesmerizing, color-pop geometry of his images is the photographer and writer’s decades long, gimlet-eyed meditation on making pictures. As Davis states, “The camera is a machine that sees only surfaces. The world casts its spell, and the camera gobbles up its glamour, uncritically, with pure certainty, assuming there is nothing underneath.” Davis’s keenly observational images, interspersed with a selection of his writings on the medium—the joys and pitfalls of camera seeing—solidify I’m Looking Through You as an unabashed celebration of photography.

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 256
Number of images: 159
Publication date: 2021-06-01
Measurements: 6.5 x 9.2 x 1 inches
ISBN: 9781597114981

“Davis’s book is a timely reminder of the breathtaking pleasure one can experience in approaching the world with sincere curiosity, eyes wide open, a camera in hand.” —British Journal of Photography

“A kaleidoscopic visual record of everyday street encounters tinged with a sense of otherworldly strangeness.” —Financial Times

Tim Davis (born in Blantyre, Malawi, 1969) lives and works in Tivoli, New York. He received a BA from Bard College, where he teaches, and an MFA from Yale University. He has presented solo exhibitions at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz, New York; White Cube, London; Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee; and Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Several monographs have been published of his work, including The New Antiquity (2010) and My Life in Politics (Aperture, 2006). He is recipient of the 2007–8 Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize and a 2005 Leopold Godowsky Jr. Color Photography Award.