My life in politics

This first in-depth publication of photographer Tim Davis’s work dissects the disenchantment and dissociation that have come to dominate American civil life. It is Davis’s treatise on the state of contemporary politics, politics as an aestheticized banality, abstracted from real issues of power. He finds freedom of expression exhibited at its most casual and cursory, with political, commercial, and populist signage jostling for space and attention in the social landscape; his documentation of that landscape, as Peter Eeley of Frieze magazine interprets it, asks “What if campaign signs, badges, bumper stickers and flags aren’t simply the ephemera of Americans’ political lives, but their substance as well?” My Life in Politics represents photographic seeing at its finest and most subtle. Davis continues Stephen Shore’s colorist tradition, meshing the careful management of a quotidian palette with an incisive eye for those points at which light bends and refracts, becoming something other than mere illumination.