David Campany (born 8 October 1967) is a British writer, curator, artist and educator, working mainly with photography. [1] He has written and edited books; contributed essays and reviews to other books, journals, magazines and websites; curated photography exhibitions; given public lectures, talks and conference papers; had exhibitions of his own work; and been a jury member for photography awards. [2] He has taught photographic theory and practice at the University of Westminster, London. [3] Campany is Managing Director of Programs at the International Center of Photography in New York City. [4]
His books have won the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Award, [5] Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, [6] Silver Award from Deutscher Fotobuchpreis [7] and the J Dudley Johnston Award from the Royal Photographic Society. [8]
Campany is co-founder and co-editor of PA magazine.
Campany grew up in Essex. [9] [10] He gained a degree in film, video and photographic arts from the Polytechnic of Central London and an MA in photographic studies from the same school, by then renamed University of Westminster.
In the 1990s Campany taught histories of art and graphic design at Winchester School of Art. [10] From 2000 to 2004 he taught photographic theory and practice at Surrey Institute of Art and Design. He became a reader in photography at the University of Westminster in 2004. [10]
Campany's book Gasoline (2013) consists of photographs of prints of petrol stations from 1945 to 1995 rescued from archives of several American newspapers that have been discarding their analogue print collections in favour of digital storage, and edited into a visual meta-narrative. [11] [12] Most of the photographs have been marked by the grease pencil of a newspaper's art director, outlining the crop required to illustrate a particular story, or stories, in the newspaper. They are often heavily retouched by hand, painting selectively over the image with white-out and pen. The second half of the book consists of pictures of the reverse of the prints, showing caption information, the name of the photographer and copyright holder, dates of publication, the newspaper, and sometimes clippings from the image's use in the paper, an archive of its own use which is lost in a digital archive. As well as being "elevated to icon in the visual language of 'America'", [1] gas stations "are quite banal but when they make news it's because there's been a crime, an accident, a price rise or a geopolitical crisis" which "makes the gas station a revealing measure of a society over the second half of the 20th century". [13] The book describes "America's relationship with the car, with travel, with consumption, with the rest of the world" and can also be read as "an allegory about news photography. Or a minor history of car design, or vernacular architecture, or street graphics, or outfits worn by pump attendants. All of the above." [1] [14] [15]
Walker Evans: the Magazine Work (2014), edited and with "an exhaustive essay" [16] by Campany, explores the period of Evans's photographic career at Fortune and other magazines, a period that has gone largely unnoticed, with Evans [17] "lauded for every part of his creative career except for his magazine work." [16] Krystal Grow, writing in Time, praised Campany's book as "Exhaustively researched and meticulously edited".
In The Open Road: Photography & the American Road Trip (2014) [18] Campany introduces the road trip as a photographic genre, the first book to do so. [9] It includes writing by Campany and photographs by Robert Frank (from The Americans ), Ed Ruscha, Inge Morath (from The Road to Reno), Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz, Jacob Holdt (from American Pictures), Stephen Shore, Bernard Plossu, Victor Burgin (from US 77), Joel Sternfeld, Shin'ya Fujiwara, Alec Soth (from Sleeping by the Mississippi), Todd Hido, Ryan McGinley, Justine Kurland, and Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs (from The Great Unreal). [19] [20]
Campany co-founded and co-edits PA magazine with Cristina Bechtler. Published since 2008, in each issue an artist is invited to select and sequence their own work and select a second artist who does the same, possibly with a dialogue about their practice.
As of March 2020 he was Managing Director of Programs at the International Center of Photography in New York City. [4]
As of October 2013 he lived in north London with his wife, Polly Braden, and two daughters. [10] The couple have since split up and Braden is a single parent. [21]
Victor Burgin is a British artist and writer. Burgin first came to attention as a conceptual artist in the late 1960s and at that time was most noted for being a political photographer of the left, who would fuse photographs and words in the same picture. He has worked with photography and film, calling painting "the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud". His work is influenced by a variety of theorists and philosophers, most especially thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Henri Lefebvre, André Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes.
The Americans is a photographic book by Robert Frank which was highly influential in post-war American photography. It was first published in France in 1958, and the following year in the United States. The photographs were notable for their distanced view of both high and low strata of American society. The book as a whole created a complicated portrait of the period that was viewed as skeptical of contemporary values and evocative of ubiquitous loneliness. "Frank set out with his Guggenheim Grant to do something new and unconstrained by commercial diktats" and made "a now classic photography book in the iconoclastic spirit of the Beats".
Stephen Shore is an American photographer known for his images of scenes and objects of the banal, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. His books include Uncommon Places (1982) and American Surfaces (1999), photographs that he took on cross-country road trips in the 1970s.
Anna Fox is a British documentary photographer, known for a "combative, highly charged use of flash and colour". In 2019 she was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society.
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Jason Evans is a Welsh photographer and lecturer on photography. His best known work is Strictly, a series of portraits of young black men dressed as "country gents" made in collaboration with stylist Simon Foxton, and which were acquired for the permanent collection of the Tate Gallery, in 2004.
Ken Grant is a photographer who since the 1980s has concentrated on working class life in the Liverpool area. He is a lecturer in the MFA photography course at the University of Ulster.
Paul Reas is a British social documentary photographer and university lecturer. He is best known for photographing consumerism in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s.
Val Williams is a British curator and author who has become an authority on British photography. She is the Professor of the History and Culture of Photography at the London College of Communication, part of the University of the Arts London, and was formerly the Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the Hasselblad Center.
Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) is a defunct organisation in London that commissions new research into photography and culture, curates and produces exhibitions and publications, organises seminars, study days, symposia and conferences, and supervises PhD students. It is a part of University of the Arts London (UAL), is based at UAL's London College of Communication at Elephant & Castle and was designated by UAL in 2003. PARC was shut down after twenty years of operating in 2023.
Mark Neville is a British social documentary photographer.
Preston is My Paris Publishing (PPP) is a photography-based project that creates publications, site-specific installations, live events, digital applications, education, writing, talks and workshops. It was started in 2009 by Adam Murray and Robert Parkinson as a photocopied zine with the intention of encouraging the exploration of Preston as a subject for creative practice and to focus more attention on the city. It has been described as "politically and photographically aware", "photographing and publishing a view of a disregarded, ordinary Britain" "in a playful way".
Karen Knorr HonFRPS is a German-born American photographer who lives in London. In 2018 she received an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society.
Le Bal is an independent arts centre in Paris. It focuses on documentary photography, video, cinema and new media through exhibitions, production, book publishing, talks and debates.
Doug Rickard was an American artist and photographer. He used technologies such as Google Street View and YouTube to find images, which he then photographed on his computer monitor. His photography has been published in books, exhibited in galleries and held in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Rickard was best known for his book A New American Picture (2010). He was the founder and publisher of the website on contemporary photography, American Suburb X, and the website These Americans which published some of his collection of found photographs.
Clare Strand is a British conceptual photographer based in Brighton and Hove in the UK. She makes, as David Campany puts it, "black-and-white photographs that would be equally at home in an art gallery, the offices of a scientific institute, or the archive of a dark cult. ... They look like evidence, but of what we cannot know."
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