“August’s work invites us to travel to Oakland, on the west coast of the United States, inside a diner. Sometimes a place of meeting but most often of passage, the famous American diner has long fascinated artists. If it’s Edward Hopper’s paintings that come to mind first, the diner will become one of the recurring symbols of American visual culture. Taken in 1985 by American photographer Steve Davis, this photograph spontaneously reminds us of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz. By the mid-1970s, all three had led to the recognition of color photography within museum institutions and art galleries. They will be the figureheads of this generation of photographers influenced by the documentary style initiated by Walker Evans and who will use color to immortalize the everyday, the ordinary, the prosaic. Steve Davis is part of this generation.
It was in the early 1980s that the photographer began the Chambers of Commerce series devoted to public spaces in the San Francisco Bay. Department stores, motels, hair salons, diners and bars became his favorite subjects. If these places are essentially places where inhabitants and tourists meet and intersect, once depopulated, time seems suspended there. But although man is absent from the images, he remains omnipresent through the objects that arrange and give rhythm to these places.
Steve Davis perceives these spaces as sculptural installations, almost like ready-mades. But these photographs also have a documentary load that plunges us into the America of the 1980s. Populated with symbols or even portraits of idols – here the duo Roy Rogers & Dale Evans and the King – Davis’s images bear witness to some American company. The Drug store – Detroit photograph from Robert Frank’s The Americans series comes to mind, in which workers side by side sip a drink after their day, but where, despite the crowds and closeness, there is a sense of loneliness dominates. It’s the same for this work of the month: the customer has left, the meal is over but has not been shared. If we can easily imagine the ambient hubbub,
In parallel with this series, Steve Davis produced, from the 1970s and still today, numerous portraits, among others of his fellow citizens, but also of those considered to be on the fringes, always directing this documentary gaze on American society.”
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