Five Cities

Stills Gallery, Sydney
Type C photographs, 80 x 60 cms

Initially what caught Davies’ imagination were the massive geopolitical changes that had taken place in the cities she was photographing during the time of her project.  The status of Moscow and Berlin in particular, had altered beyond recognition. 

The images she chose to enlarge to mural size tend to be long exposures, often taken at dusk or at night.  But while the images are therefore chromatically intense, their saturated colours seem thickened and coagulated, as though tainted by some foreign chromogen

As Walter Benjamin noted in his Moscow and Berlin diaries in the thirties, and as Francis Yates also pointed out in The Art of Memory, cities are ways of thinking … mnemonic machines, simultaneously operating on every level from the individual to the epochal.  Davies is not interested in broad, clear thoroughfares  ... hers is a more fragmented city, seen in oblique and occluded glimpses, fleeting views down strange alleys of stark lighting fixtures,  threatening-looking people, shadows and indecipherable segments of advertisements.

Martyn Jolly,
Art Monthly, November 1995, No 85.