"John Davies is one of today's most outstanding British photographers, he became famous through his research on the English industrial landscape, observed in vast and detailed views...

John Davies's work belongs to the world of contemporary documentary photography. Faithful to a refined, pure black and white, taken on as the absolute rule of a subtle, analytic style. He chooses the vastness of space inhabited by the powerful elements of nature and the contradictory ones of culture to operate in two directions. On the one hand, the evocation of emotional states through the photographic rendering of a space-light that is alive, almost metaphysical, and recalls the symbolisation of the forces of nature in Turner. On the other, a crystal-clear gaze that sounds the material aspects of the contemporary landscape which is tied to the development of the productive activities and concrete structuring of the world through the molding power of economy and property".

Roberta Valtorta
from the exhibition catalogues "Sguardigardesani" 1999 and "Milan without borders" 2000.

John Davies (born in Sedgefield, County Durham, England,1949 and now living in Liverpool) is internationally known for the lucidity with which he has tackled the rural and urban landscape through his refined B&W photographs. He is very much a narrative landscape photographer, interested, even in his 'purest' landscapes in telling visual stories about process, change, transformation.

Davies began in the mid-Seventies with a prolonged analysis of the "wild and natural" landscapes of the British Isles ( Mist Mountain Water Wind, 1985 & Skylines, 1993 ). In 1981 he began an articulate documentation of urban Britain, concentrating on the changes provoked by the industrial and post-industrial landscape ( A Green & Pleasant Land, 1986 ). These photographs were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Pompidou Centre, Paris and in London at the Royal Academy of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

During the mid-Eighties he started working in Western Europe on a variety of architectural and environmental projects (Cross Currents, 1992 ). With three monographs commissioned and published in France (Temps et Paysage, 2000; Le retour de la nature, 2001 and Seine Valley, 2002).

At the beginning of 2000 he started the Metropoli Project, to investigate the major post industrial cities within the UK. The exhibition from this work Urban Dreams concentrates on city centres. and, typically, were made from high vantage points to reveal the architectural infrastructure and topography of the city. In 2006 his monograph of The British Landscape was published by Chris Boot with a major retrospective of Britsh work at PhotoEspaña in Madrid.

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