Before completing his Masters of Art at London’s Royal College in 1993, Robert Davies had been a bike messenger, foxhunting documentarian, and an adventurer in India. The British experimentalist’s photographic series are just as multifaceted as his biography. Whether creating luminous cameraless color studies in the darkness of the photo lab or photographing romantic foggy landscapes, whether commemorating the precision of the Formula 1 with prickly sharp detailed composition or experimenting with long and multiple exposures, Robert Davies exploits the medium’s possibilities.


And when billions of people follow the World Cup games on TV, he feels obliged to trace this phenomenon of collective observation and unified interest. And with their surveillance-camera look, the video stills he uses assume something ghostly. But what we see, mostly schematic and blurred, are not the coincidentally captured moments of crime but rather definitive scenes and scored goals of modern heroes, which become the fateful moments of national history. When Robert Davies robs the Formula 1 of its speed or depicts the hysteria of a banal soccer game as a gladiator battle, he agilely leaps over the borders between documentation and abstraction and, through this, continues to test our very pleasurably learned customs of seeing.

Dr. Boris von Brauchitsch