Adam Davies is an award-winning photographer whose large-format film photography explores architecture, social systems, and public spaces, using these subjects to pose questions about place, identity, materiality, and history. Said David Tomkins, Writer/Editor of The Chinati Foundation, Marfa: There’s an enigmatic quality to Davies’ images, and to the places they depict. The pictures bear a trace of something a bit uncanny, because the places they depict are quietly but insistently someplace else – or at least the threshold to someplace else… maybe a little magical, maybe a little cursed.

Adam is a recipient of grants from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Vira Heinz Endowment, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and has attended residencies at Chinati Foundation, Creative Alliance, Fine Arts Work Center, and Yaddo. He has worked as a Lecturer & Media Specialist at the National Gallery of Art, Washington and taught at Carnegie Mellon, Catholic, Robert Morris, and Harvard Universities. In 2015, Adam was named as Outstanding Emerging Artist at the DC Mayor’s Arts Awards and was the recipient of the Clarence John Laughlin Award. Between 2016–19, he was an artist-in-residence at Creative Alliance in Baltimore where his 2018 exhibition featured collaborations with Los Angeles-based musician Alex Zhang Hungtai and Chicago-based percussionist Adam Rosenblatt. He is currently working with two award-winning authors: Joan Wickersham on a project based upon the seventeenth-century Swedish shipwreck Vasa and Ivy Pochoda on an exploration of the annual wildflower bloom that borders the highways in downtown Los Angeles.

I have long been fascinated by the issue of human engagement with the natural and built environment: how we experience our surroundings and, in turn, how we affect them. I am interested in representing the possibilities of a hybrid landscape – in which buildings and the surrounding environment are fused – creating photographs that offer a different perspective on architecture, one that downplays a heroic conquest of nature and looks instead for modes of coexistence with it.

I primarily work with a large-format view camera. Standard equipment for architecture photographers in the mid-twentieth century, this film camera allows for the movement of the lens separately from the back of the camera, altering the perspective, depth-of-field, and angle of focus within each image. The resulting negative is scanned and colour-corrected digitally. Working in this manner is time-consuming but creates a unique image – one that retains the distinct quality of film, its look and grain structure, while utilising the advantages of digital production. The final images possess an extremely high resolution, producing prints that convey a tactile sense of the materiality of the subjects and their surrounding spaces.