My Life in Politics

It can be hard to tell if Davis's collection of portraits of political activists, office holders and campaign iconography is art photography masquerading as documentary journalism or the other way around. Davis, a graduate of Yale's prestigious M.F.A. program, evinces some affinity with the photographic styles of well-known Yale faculty—the melancholic gazes of Philip-Lorca diCorcia's subjects and the eerie lighting of Gregory Crewdson's suburbia. Nearly all of the images are overtly political, but it would be a mistake to read them as entirely journalistic and ignore their lush colors and calibrated proportions. The most successful ones keep obvious political references at arm's length and instead show off Davis's formal techniques—the reflective glare that obscures a politician's face in a painted portrait, or the shiny abstraction of oozing purple droplets in a puddle of oil. There are moments in this collection when the relentless theme treads dangerously close to cliché or sounds a heavy-handed note of cynicism. But rather than the predictable arguments one might expect from an avowedly liberal undertaking, the series succeeds in presenting pleasurable surprises and deeply poignant moments, offering a significant contribution to the art of American documentary photography. (May)