Untitled, 2016. Kerala, India.

Ever since he was young, Davison has had a strong interest in literature and art. Much of his work is inspired in one way or another by the historical canon of photography. Which genre or school might have inspired this image, Untitled, 2016? Due to the short distance between the camera lens and the model, the viewer is brought up very close to the subject’s skin: we can see the individual eyelash and eyebrow hairs, as well as the tiny capillaries on the eyelid. The prickly fruit clashes with the dreamy image of the closed eye and recalls the surrealist photography from the 1920s and 30s, for instance by Man Ray. This work was part of the exhibition Revisiting Pictures, from which several works are included in the Foam collection. Davidson’s oeuvre is a journey through the history of photography, from avant-gardist experiments to objective documentation, and from early 20th-century portraiture to conceptual studies.