 |
I'm Looking Through You. By Tim Davis.
 |
Photographs by Tim Davis
Aperture, New York, 2021. In English. 276 pp.
“I’m pretty good at photography,” states Tim Davis toward the end of his new monograph I’m Looking Through You. “I’m, like, good at it.” Such a boast would be hyperbole coming from most photographers. But Davis has the goods to back it up. Coming from him the declaration is merely another clear-eyed fact like the pictures it accompanies. Davis shot them in and around Los Angeles over the course of a few years between 2017 and 2019.
The city of angels is huge and multifarious. No single tome can do it justice, but this one makes a damned good effort. It’s a sprawling metropolis of a photobook, over 250 pages thick, with pictures, icons, texts, and motifs all taking turns at the star role. The whole enterprise is couched in slick rainbow packaging that would make any Tinseltown producer proud.
Davis has been engaged with photo projects of one sort or another for a few decades now. A quick overview reveals an astonishing diversity. He’s photographed politics, antiquities, parking lots, edible sculpture, classical paintings, office lighting, broken signs, and more. He’s created videos, penned art critiques, and recorded a music album. He’s even photographed his own audiences. All charming on their own, but in this book he might have finally found the vehicle for every interest.
 |
The fact that he was a temporary visitor, exploring a new city with fresh eyes, likely spurred his process. “The whole place is kind of underseen,” he told Fold Magazine. “No one’s paying much attention to it. Everyone is zooming by on their way to the parking lot of some place.” LA’s visual spoils were just laying there, waiting for the right itinerant shutterbug. Davis took up the challenge. “I would try to explore everything that I was capable of as a 47-year-old photographer with a lifetime of practicing,” he says, “a project that was as broad as possible, a reach into my quiver — everything I think the camera can do.”
All pictures appear in vertical format. Reproduced without captions, in a rich So-Cal palette, they might be screen tests or ad proofs. There are no chapters or themes, and the sequence appears haphazard at first. But it follows roughly in step-by-step order, each picture linked by a subtle visual cue to its predecessor. The winding path is there but faint, loose enough not to impose itself. Most readers will find it as liberating as the city it documents.
 |
In addition to his photo talents, it turns out Davis is a first-class writer too. He contributes three essays to the book, roughly interspersed at the beginning, middle, and end. Perhaps “essay” is too strong a word. These are freewheeling personal anecdotes written in a rambling poetic tone, like Kerouac’s introduction to The Americans. The first passage describes how Davis conceived the LA project, the second recounts a photographic interaction inside a bar which went delightfully haywire (many photographers will nod in affirmation reading Davis’s labored response to the dreaded question “what are you really doing?”), and the last is a thought-provoking romp through dismemberment in Bulgaria. All are narrative accounts, but they detour so freely into photo philosophy and experience that they might serve as primers in a Photo 101 course, or perhaps Memoir 101. Is this what it’s actually like to be a working photographer? Yes, at least for one distracted wanderer in the city of dreams.
The title I’m Looking Through You might refer to the translucency of rainbow prisms. For Davis it’s also a sly comment on LA and its famously cosmetic essence. “People from the East Coast are always talking about LA as a shallow place that’s all surface,” he says, before turning the tables on its supposed shortcoming. “As a photographer, I have realized that cameras only see the surface…I believe in passionately in the surface of things. I think that it matters a lot. It has a lot to offer. #I’mlookingthroughyou is almost like a metaphorical pun on the inability to look through anything, except for the camera.”
In glitz, girth, and ambition I’m Looking Through You captures the spirit of LA. Davis called this book, “The best thing I’ve ever done” on Instagram. A bold claim, and perhaps one intended as surface-level critique. But there’s a grain of truth to it. Coming from him the declaration is merely another clear-eyed fact, in a book which is full of them.
Purchase Book
Read More Book Reviews
 |
 |
Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.