scott b. davis: sonora
by scott b. davis
132 pages and 93 images,
Published by Radius Books in 2021

Book information and purchase page at Radius Books or see the Amazon listing

There is a useful exercise, when learning photography, where you choose any random location—a street corner, a meadow, a parking lot, the hallway in your home, really just anywhere—and your task is to create ten interesting photographs without moving from that spot. You don’t need to overthink it, you just need to make them visually interesting.

You can modify the exercise to be more challenging by requiring a single camera, a signal lens, a single style of processing, and so forth.

You might assume that the version of the exercise with the fewest constraints would allow for the most creativity and that the most constrained version of the exercise would be a creative straightjacket, resulting in soulless images, imprisoned by too many rules.

If you did assume that, you’d probably be wrong.

scott b. davis, who both uses his middle initial and styles his name in all lowercase (I will honor those preferences here despite the misgivings of my spellcheck), has found that constraints are a catalyst to his vision of what a photograph might be, doing things with his simple-looking images that invoke surprise, delight, even laughter. He works with platinum and palladium prints (and various combinations thereof), old-timey processes that can result in paper-based images of translucent beauty, and he works with paper negatives, a method of producing images done in the 1800s in the dawning decades of photography but today relegated to the far corners of photographic practice.

More constraining, some years ago he made an error with a negative—I think I know what he did but I’ll refrain from hazarding a guess since he doesn’t seem to want to share the specifics—that resulted in the look of the images he produces today. I mention the technique, even obliquely, only to say that if I am correct then it is the sort of error that would in almost all cases result in a photographer automatically throwing the negative away, obviously ruined. But something inside of davis, in that moment, stayed his hand, his inner Moonwatcher staring at the bone in his hand, a puzzled look on his face, an awareness dawning.

His pictures tend to be two-toned, typically with the line of some jagged cliff demarcating the tones from one another. You might say that they are abstract but I don’t think that is quite correct. They are quite specific—their subjects are all from the desert, probably from the Sonoran Desert (davis is from San Diego, so that puts him in close proximity to the Sonoran, and the book is entitled sonora), although the precise location within the Sonoran seems irrelevant. You get the sense that davis spends a lot of time in the desert (he does) and that he is looking at the desert as a part of his world (his physical world and his inner world) rather than something exotic that he is exploring for our benefit. He’s not a guide and he’s not giving us a tour.

Imagine going into Yosemite Valley and making images that give no real clue to your location, no hint at all of the specificity of where you are making the images, yet give a stripped-down sense of the cliff edges, the trees skylit, the sky, the sun in the sky. Davis is not in the Sonroan’s equivalent of Yosemite Valley (is there such a thing?) but he is giving us a powerful sense of place despite not being in any particular place.

There is a hard-to-describe physicality in davis’s images both in person and in the book. The book images use a paper surface that—I don’t have the vocabulary to give the surface its proper name—reminds me of photo paper from the turn of the century. He is a “maker”—that tribe of craftsmen who delight in the innovative building of devices and physical things—and he uses view cameras, sometimes crazy large ones, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised (in fact, I assume it) that he has built some of these cameras himself. This maker sentiment flows through not only the cameras but also his platinum and palladium prints. Apparently, his prints are all contact printed—where a negative, as large as the printed image, is placed touching the paper during exposure, this photographic embrace resulting in a print not only the same size as the negative but also in a print of great fidelity. His maker sentiment flows through the paper negatives (where paper is coated with a light-sensitive emulsion and the image is formed directly, without an intermediary negative) and through his placement of one image next to another, where a print’s juxtaposition to other prints may create an emotional vibration that can sometimes happen between images—photography’s equivalent of a sunset’s green flash.

davis’s work reflects the history of the medium, and the book’s appendix/interview includes a mid-1800s image by John Beasley Greene, a photographer of far-away places, from the beginning years of the medium. (A wonderful exhibit of Greene’s work opened in 2020 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—where I saw it and I’m sure davis did not miss it there—but its multi-museum run was aborted by the pandemic). This history, the physicality of the images, his work flowering under conditions of such self-imposed constraints (and there are more constraints than the ones I’ve mentioned—did I mention many of the images are made with UV-only light?), speaks to a highly mature body of work, in fact so mature and fully realized that I cannot see where he might go from here. We may have here the full flowering of an artistic vision, the peak of his journey down this particular path—or davis may see some way upward that I am blind to. It’s an interesting journey and if this is the peak it is a high one.

This book is copyrighted 2021 but in my memory it actually came out in early 2022 (my own book experienced a similar delay, making its copyright a year earlier than its availability date) and I purchased my copy in May of that year, despite a vow to myself that I would purchase fewer photobooks. And then I had an idea—why not wait to open the box and look at the book until I was in an appropriate place? My book reviews are written not from some theoretical or academic perch but from the perspective of a photographer and I write of my reaction to a book immediately after experiencing it, sometimes I write of the experience itself while I am in the middle of that experience. So, I thought, why not experience davis’s book in the Sonoran desert, the place informing the book of the place?

For the next six months the unopened box from Radius Books, the publisher, jostled around in my FJ Cruiser and I drove to Texas and back (spending time in the Saguaro National Park and at many other points within the Sonoran Desert) all without finding the time to allow me to open the box and experience the book. I moved the box to a shelf in my office and kept thinking it would be time soon for davis’s book but that time never came. Until now.

And here I am, almost two and a half years later and nearly a thousand words into this and I haven’t even mentioned one of the most delightful aspects of his work—davis’s playfulness. To see this playfulness in action you need to go through the book twice. Go through it once as you normally would, taking your time to feel each image, each spread, taking time to notice details (in images not nearly as devoid of details as a first glance should suggest) and to let the book do its work. Then close the book, front cover up, and spin the book around so that it is upside down, and then go through the book again. Go through it again upside down.

It will quickly become apparent that many of the images you took for depictions of cliff edges the first time through the book were indeed cliff edges, except that the cliff was on the top of the image and the sky on the bottom. You see them now, in the upside-down book, in their natural orientation. That little tree gives it away. Other times the images are flipped, and sometimes multi-image cliff lines are images that were not really taken in the same place (but sometimes they may be, with davis using multiple cameras to produce the work), maybe the picture is inverted, maybe not, maybe one image is layered on top of another. Lots of things going on. The physicality of the image again, it’s something you can touch, something you can spin around upside down. The reader, by the end of the book, can join in on this playfulness, accordingly.

So now you have to go back through the book a third time, turning the book around to its proper orientation and going page to page, experiencing the book a little bit fresh, even though you’ve just gone through it twice minutes before.

Even on a first sitting, this book with empty-looking (at first) images and not-much-seemingly-going-on images (at first) will take time. So take your time. There’s a lot here to notice, a lot here to enjoy. There is an uncommon amount of photography in davis’s photographs.