Sian Davey
Each one of us take snapshots of our family and friends, but few of us are able to capture our moments as well as Sian Davey. Davey captures sweet portraits in a way that enables us to glimpse her life and hear the sounds echoing from the photographs. We all know these moments personally. The river. The dirtiness of childhood. The loving but messy family dinner. We are able to recognize ourselves and our family in each portrait and that is what makes us love Davey and her family. Hers mimics ours.
Davey started to photograph her surroundings during the same time her father was loosing his life; to collect and document and understand her life. After working as a psychotherapist for 15 years, perhaps this is why Davey is able to show us the true personality of each subject, therefore bringing us closer to the individual we are staring at.
Davey describes this sameness we share in terms of what Ancient Greek scholars wrote on- palimpsest, which was used as our modern day chalkboard, over and over. In Davey's words, "The parchment could never be entirely cleaned, so traces of its history always remained, merging with new. A dinner table is a palimpsest of sorts. Countless moments, memories, thoughts, events and experiences are exchanged across and written upon this table; and at the end of every meal, it is then cleared and scrubbed clean - but not entirely."
"Each of us are palimpsests too. We are evidence of the generations before us, and of those that we create, who will follow us. We are a culmination of everything up to this moment..."
© Sian Davey