Bevan Davies
American, 1941-
Los Angeles, 1976
gelatin silver print
10 7/8 × 15 3/8 in.
SBMA, Gift of Martha Henderson
2017.14.6
COMMENTS
Bevan Davies’s meticulously printed photographs suggest an appreciation of this form of residential architecture with respect both to the facades on which their identities hinge and to the built spaces between those facades. Preferring to photograph during early morning hours on weekends, Davies positioned the film plane of his 8x10-inch camera parallel to the buildings’ fronts, to capture the nuanced play of shadows. The resulting images lend depth to structural and decorative elements that are simultaneously utilitarian and aesthetic. – from ‘Ed Ruscha and Some Los Angeles Apartments’ by Virginia Heckert
Los Angeles, 1976 is an exquisitely-produced collection of Bevan Davies’s photographs of Los Angeles residential architecture, a subject perfectly suited to his working methods at that time. Born in 1941 and educated at the University of Chicago during the 1960s, Bevan Davies hit his intellectual and artistic stride in the 1970s, dovetailing perfectly with the uniquely fertile grounds that Los Angeles was becoming during that decade.
The immediate impact of the work Davies produced at this time is reflected in the list of solo and group exhibitions in which his photographs was shown, including such venues as Sonnabend Gallery, New York; International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Palais de Beaux Arts, Brussels. Photographs by Bevan Davies are included in the permanent collections of many important including, including The Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum, New York; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
- Nazraeli Press, Paso Robles, CA
http://www.nazraeli.com/complete-catalogue/bevan-davies-los-angeles-1976
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
Documenting Los Angeles at a time of rapid development and cultural ferment, these ten black-and-white photographs by Bevan Davies offer an incisive survey of the city’s unique late-Modernist architecture. Counting Bruce Davidson and Diane Arbus among his early influences, Davies began his career photographing people. However, it was within New York City’s concrete-laden streets and the urban sprawl of Los Angeles that he harnessed the subject matter that would bring his art notice: the built environment of the contemporary American city.
Davies’s photographs reveal how our constructed surroundings can appear both artificial and authentic, tacky and elegant, eccentric and charming. His mastery of the large-format view camera allowed the distinctly geometric buildings of Southern California’s cityscapes to transcend their identities as family homes and apartment complexes. Taken in the soft glow of early-morning light, the photographs exude an airy cleanness that makes them bracing to behold. Every detail in these otherwise unremarkable scenes is intricately rendered, from the jagged shadows of palm branches to the quirky retro ornaments that adorn each façade. Framed in harmonious symmetry, these everyday buildings exude the aura of pristine sculptural objects.
Davies created this portfolio in 1976 when the New Topographics movement was on the ascendant. Named for a 1975 exhibition of the same name at the International Center for Photography in New York, New Topographics artists probed the often uneasy intersections of their era’s built and natural environments with a highly deliberate eye that bordered on the documentary. Akin to the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Ed Ruscha and Judy Fiskin, Davies’s photographs possess a distinct identity and scale, and were included in early exhibitions that featured artists working in this aesthetically analytic approach. A recent gift to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, these photographs are the first Davies works to enter the Museum’s collection and are on view here for the first time at the SBMA.
- Crosscurrents, 2018