| Dates: | 1856 (1854 Grove Art Online) - 1930, December | | Born: | Great Britain, London (Great Britain, Suffolk, Lowestoft - Grove Art Online) | | Died: | France, Antibes | | Active: | UK |
An early exponent of impressionistic photography, Davison was also a wealthy managing director of Kodak and ardent social reformer, and a founder member of the Linked Ring Brotherhood. He was a great photographic catalyst to his contemporaries although his own work has been neglected since then.
[Courtesy of Pam Roberts]Preparing biographies Approved biography for George Davison
(Courtesy of Christian Peterson) |
Born in Lowestoft (Suffolk), England, in September 1856, George Davison made his way to London and worked there as a civil servant for about twenty years.
In 1890, he burst upon the English photographic scene with his soft-focus images and his lectures on impressionistic photography at the Royal Society of Arts. His 1890 image The Onion Field, made with a pinhole camera, was considered particularly radical for its use of all-over diffusion, a departure from the "naturalistic" tradition of Peter Henry Emerson. Davison photographed primarily rural subjects, printing them in platinum, gum-bichromate, and photogravure.
Davison exhibited from the late 1880s to the 1910s. In 1888, his work was included in the annual exhibition of London’s Royal Photographic Society and the international exhibition at Vienna. Subsequently, he showed in Brussels, Glasgow, New York, Paris, Philadelphia, Rochester, and Syracuse. His work was seen in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, the 1910 International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at Buffalo’s Albright Art Gallery, and An International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography, organized by Clarence H. White for New York’s Erich Art Galleries in 1914.
Davison was active in English organizations and visible in international publications. He served as the honorary secretary of the Camera Club of London for nearly a decade, beginning in 1885. In 1892, he was a founding member of the artistically advanced group of photographers, the Linked Ring Brotherhood. With them, his moniker was, inexplicably, "Deputy High Executioner." Alfred Stieglitz featured a photogravure by Davison in the April 1902 issue of Camera Notes, America’s leading photographic quarterly. About five years later, when Stieglitz had moved on to edit and publish the even more exquisite periodical Camera Work, he included eight of Davison’s photogravures. England’s own Photograms of the Year reproduced his work six times between 1897 and 1911.
Davison had bought preferred shares of Eastman Kodak stock in 1889, early in the company’s existence. As a result of the firm’s immense success, he gained great wealth and was apparently on good terms personally with George Eastman. He owned several homes and a houseboat on the Thames in London. By 1897, he held a directorial position with the English division of Kodak, for whom he also produced straightforward advertising photographs. Davison was a devoted Christian Socialist, whose activities were misinterpreted as being anarchist, and in 1912 he was forced to resign from Kodak. Shortly thereafter, he left his family in London, retreating to a castle he had built in Harlech, North Wales. He remained active for a number of years in socialist and pacifist causes, and maintained friendships with such fellow English pictorialists as Frederick H. Evans. George Davison died in December 1930, at his home in the French Riviera city of Antibes.
Christian A. Peterson Pictorial Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Christian A. Peterson: Privately printed, 2012)
This biography is courtesy and copyright of Christian Peterson and is included here with permission.
Date last updated: 1 June 2013.
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| Getty Research, Los Angeles, USA has an ULAN (Union List of Artists Names Online) entry for this photographer. This is useful for checking names and they frequently provide a brief biography. | | Go to website | Grove Art Online (www.groveart.com) has a biography of this artist.
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