Control Screening

CONTROL SCREENING

PHOTOGRAPHER'S PROJECT

TIM DAVIS

The classicists who write photography textbooks dutifully translate photography from the Greek as “light writing.” It was Cervantes who said: “Translation is the back side of a tapestry,” and in the case of photography's many translators, most have been staring at the wall. In photographic language, light is read as grammar; as an aesthetic tool, helping the artist describe an apprehended visual world. I am pursuing a visual world where light is syntactic; light veering close to content. In all my work light is cultural and political. It is put there by someone for a purpose: to invite citizens to share their money with corporations, to keep workers working, to describe democracy, to allow paintings in museums to be seen in one particular way.

In my series “lllilluminations,” I am photographing grand and gorgeous failures of light to sync up to its supposed functions: Braille billboards, damaging elaborate shadows behind museum sculptures, spring pear blossoms arc-lit into oblivion. The pictures in these pages are shot from the displays of airport screening machines. Everyone Western is familiar with these precautionary images; with their surgical invasiveness and inevitable beauty. In the taupe humdrum of airport travel, they stand out like the illuminated capitals of medieval manuscripts. Searching for different densities of material, the screens display images that look amazingly like charcoal drawings. That articulation—a governmentsanctioned security measure, creating charcoal drawings made entirely of light—is as complex a nesting of beauty and irony as I as an artist have handled. It represents a reason, I believe, to use photography. These images make me feel I have seen—and, better, understood—the light.©

Tim Davis