Paris Photo, Paris, 2025: Jack Davison
Grand Palais
3 avenue du Général Eisenhower
75008 Paris
Portrait photography has always been at the core of Jack Davison’s practice, the subject he returns to most instinctively amid his many photographic experiments. Now a father of two, Davison finds less time for spontaneous personal projects, yet 87 Portraits represents a deliberate effort to reclaim space for his enduring fascination with the human face.
This new body of work unites Davison’s lifelong passion for portraiture with his recent exploration of photopolymer gravure printing, a process that merges photography with the tactile depth of printmaking.
Conceived as the first in an ongoing series, 87 Portraits began in London, where Davison in collaboration with the casting director Coco Wu, street-cast eighty-seven individuals from across the city and
photographed them over three days.
Presented by Cob at Paris Photo, 87 Portraits debuts as an immersive installation composed entirely of the first prints in the edition. The gravures encircle the booth in a continuous constellation of faces, creating a quiet yet compelling rhythm between individuality and collectivity. With each new edition, Davison plans to repeat the process in a different city, constructing a serial portrait of contemporary life through successive iterations.
Evidence of Davison’s embrace of this tactile printmaking method can be seen throughout the work: in several gravures, he deliberately smudges and manipulates the ink surface, introducing a surreal, handmade quality that blurs the line between photograph and object. Since his solo exhibition at Cob Gallery, Davison has printed all his black-and-white images exclusively in this historic medium.
Davison’s portraiture occupies a singular space between the surreal and the everyday, blending formal experimentation with emotional intimacy. Working largely in black and white, he employs chiaroscuro lighting, deep contrasts, and unconventional framing to transform his subjects into sculptural, psychologically charged presences. Rather than pursuing faithful likeness, he distorts and fragments faces and bodies through mirrors, reflections, and shadow; producing images that feel both immediate and dreamlike. Drawing inspiration from early avant-garde and surrealist photography while engaging with the visual sensibilities of the digital age, Davison bridges editorial and fine-art traditions, creating work that feels simultaneously timeless and distinctly contemporary.
The launch of 87 Portraits coincides with the acquisition of two of Davison’s portraits for the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery.
Jack Davison depicts the human figure, architecture, animals, objects, landscapes and townscapes; yet his subject is always photography itself. Uncovering the surreal and the sensual in everyday life, Davison's use of chiaroscuro, framing and exposure as instruments of abstraction draws on the history of photography. Parallels have also been made with Max Ernst and Man Ray, keying him into a Surrealist inheritance.
