the blueshift journal
blueshift / ˈblo͞oˌSHift / noun
the displacement of the spectrum to shorter wavelengths in the light coming from distant celestial objects moving toward the observer.
March 2015
Steve Davis is a documentary portrait and landscape photographer based in the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Russian Esquire, and is in many collections, including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Seattle Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the George Eastman House. He is a former 1st place recipient of the Santa Fe CENTER Project Competition, and two time winner of Washington Arts Commission/Artist Trust Fellowships . Davis is the Coordinator of Photography, media curator and adjunct faculty member of The Evergreen State College. He is represented by the James Harris Gallery, Seattle.
Captured Youth
Unfinished: Incarcerated Youth brings together Davis’s color and black and white portraits of the residents of these “schools.” Shot with an 8x10 camera, the portraits highlight each individual, often through extreme close-ups. Confronted with evidence of their youth, the viewer must draw conclusions about each person’s past and possible future—a future surely influenced by the experience of youth incarceration—from the simultaneously vast and limited information in each photograph.
Interspersed between three portrait sections are black and white photographs by the residents themselves, made through workshops led by Davis at three of the four detention facilities within which he photographed. These provide an authentic and interior view of aspects of daily life for young people learning and often living within what is essentially a prison environment.
The book will contain an essay by Aaron Dixon, co-founder of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party and a human rights activist.
http://minormattersbooks.com/collections/books/products/steve-davis-unfinished-incarcerated-youth
