Looking Back/Moving Forward

Australian independent publisher Uneven Press recently released a second edition of Sean Davey’s self-published book ‘Dog Food & Oysters’ (originally published in 2013). Davey made the photographs in the United States when he was 24 years old. 18 years later, Davey reflects on what the work means to him now.

This photograph, made in West Virginia, serves as inspiration for the book’s title (2004).

Dog Food & Oysters follows two road trips taken by photographer Sean Davey across the United States in 2004 and 2005 as the US led war in Iraq intensified. The images record both ordinary moments of American civil life as well as glimpses of underlying social and political unease.

Almost twenty years on from the Iraq War and amidst another destructive war, Davey’s photographs stand particularly pertinent: a quiet and oblique view of a nation and its self-image through its distinct symbols, cultural imagery and landscape, precisely observed with a roving, documentary eye.

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I made these photographs almost 20 years ago and today they still interest me and give me pause for thought. In a personal way it makes me proud of my decisions to make the pictures I did all those years ago.

As a 24 year old, I was searching for something more, not necessarily experiences, stories or subjects, but for something within myself, a visual confidence that I believed in, yet had not fully realised.

A family gathers at the White House in Washington, D.C. (2004).

The USA road trip is far from new ground, ironically, it is closer to photographic cliché. To me however, young, naive and inexperienced, it was a space in which to develop an ability to trust my own instincts.

I never thought of the photographs in this work as a definitive document of a country or even of personal experience, rather, it became a series of photographs that was able to sit on its own as more of a feeling than anything else.

The US/Mexico border at Ciudad Juarez, Mexico (2004).

There are certain recurring themes in this work, and in them I see my younger self actively trying to find my own space between journalism and art. There are obvious references to religion, military, politics, labour and class, things I was concerned with to different degrees at the time. I also wanted to honour the work of Robert Frank, whose seminal work in the USA was made exactly 50 years earlier. Without wanting nor trying to compare myself in any way to Frank, it would have been remiss of me not to be aware of his influence. Ignoring it would have been a mistake.

Military cadets during a parade in Washington D.C. (2004).

Perhaps the space I was looking for — that between journalism and art — was never to be found, but rather existed outside of them entirely. I never truly felt like a journalist, nor an artist, but as a photographer I found my own space in which to engage with the world and to navigate my way through it.

Motel Room, Kentucky (2004).

This body of work holds special value to me because it sits as the first completed work in which this feeling of truly being a photographer was starting to evolve.

Sean Davey (2022)

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Dog Food & Oysters (2022) was recently launched at the 2022 Photo Festival in Melbourne, and at Luna Studio in Sydney. The book is available from Uneven Press.

A limited edition collector’s edition with five prints available from the photographer’s website here.