Faces have at all times held a selected form of fascination for Jack Davison. Known for his brooding therapy of sunshine and shade, the Essex-based style and documentary photographer is drawn to portraiture for the mercurial nuances of expression. “There’s something about a face that can change on a dime,” he says. “It can change in light, in tone, in mood.” His newest exhibition, Portraits: 14-16 November, is a collection of 90 portraits of 90 particular person faces – every captured in an “in-between” perspective and reproduced along with his signature dramatic chiaroscuro.
Shot quickly over just some days – from the 14th to sixteenth of November, because the title suggests – Davison labored with casting director Coco Wu to street-cast all his topics. The fashions they chose from the streets of London are all very completely different from each other, however they every possess their very own uniquely anachronistic high quality. “I always look for faces that feel like they could be modern, but they also could be from the 1920s, or they could be from 200 years ago,” Davison says. He intentionally omitted a yr from the title’s date; he didn‘t need it to be anchored in a selected time. “I like the idea of this book being found by someone in the future who has no idea how old the pictures are. I wanted that mystery,” he says.
The stark styling of the collection amplifies its timelessness. The pictures are close-cropped and lots of of his topics put on the identical monastic-style hood to obscure their hair and some other extraneous defining options that may date the photographs or detract from the depth of the face. “Sometimes the hair was too modern or specific, so the hood is an equiliser,” he explains. “It hides everything apart from the face. There are no headphones or jewellery. It’s an exercise in simplicity, paring back the portrait to its most essential qualities. I’m always interested in how much more we can simplify this to its most pure form; portraits focusing on the face.”
What makes the proper portrait? Having gathered a mess of photographs of every sitter, how does Davison choose the defining picture? “There’s definitely an instinct to it,” he displays. “There are also habitual things I do. For instance, there’s only one photograph in the series where someone’s looking directly at the camera – everyone else is in the middle distance, or looking away. I’m trying to find all those transitory moments where the subject is a bit less aware of what’s happening; where it feels more of a caught moment – that in-between expression where they’re somewhere else in their head. I find, when a viewer looks at them, there’s more space for meaning. If their gaze is direct, there’s power in that, but sometimes less mystery.”
If the averted eyes of Davison’s topics are much less confrontational than direct eye contact, inviting the viewer to ponder the portraits extra deeply, then the dimensions of those photos can also be alluring. At roughly 11 x 8 inches, every print is comparatively modest in measurement. “They’re quite small as objects. We found that people achieve a stronger connection to them [when they’re smaller]; it invites you to come closer. Originally, they were almost like postage stamps, but we decided that was too small.”
The texture of the prints themselves additionally requires nearer inspection; the exhibition calls for to be seen shut, in actual life. Davison used a method referred to as photopolymer gravure – an intaglio printmaking method that transfers photographic pictures onto a light-sensitive plate for printing on a press. Having shot the originals digitally, this course of is bodily extra satisfying. As with gardening, there‘s an element of “getting your hands dirty” about working with ink that appeals to Davison. “It’s messy,” he says, “It’s like being connected to something physical. It gives you the feeling of producing objects rather than digital files. And, because the images are quite simple, it just adds to the character – you get imperfections, so each one is unique and different.”
The high-contrast impact of the printing method can also be part of Davison’s want to distil the method all the way down to the purest type of portraiture; the stark shadows simplify the contours of the face in a approach that remembers Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Francis Bacon can also be a touchstone. “I’m always interested in reducing something down to its most essential, pure form. With faces, because we are programmed to recognise faces so easily, you can get away with so much more abstraction than with other subjects. Francis is a master of this,” he says. Like Bacon, Davison’s early brush with Catholicism touches his work specifically methods, usually unconsciously. Some of his portraits from the exhibition are lowered to a kind through which they may virtually be stencils or spiritual icons, harking back to the sculpted stone faces adorning the facade of cathedrals. He’s not spiritual, he explains, “but you don’t know how much all those Sunday church visits as a child stay with you”.
Portraits: 14-16 November by Jack Davison is on present at Cob Gallery in London from 6 March – 2 April 2026.
