Keith F. Davis

Temples of Democracy

March 7-April 30, 2008

These photographs were begun in an intensive five-year period, 1982 to 1987. However, my interest in this subject has never waned and the series continues today. In that initial five-year period, I visited about two-thirds of the nation’s state houses, from Maine to Wyoming, Wisconsin to Louisiana. This project was conceived as a personal and poetic quest. No attempt was made to be either systematic or encyclopedic in coverage. While I would have enjoyed visiting all fifty capitols, I accepted that this was unlikely. I also realized that some of the buildings I visited simply resisted being photographed (by me, at least) in any genuinely interesting way. It was easy to record the facts of these places, but much harder to shape those facts into satisfying pictures. Ultimately, I’m not sure how useful these images may be for architectural historians—that is, what sort of balance they strike between an objective sense of documentation and a more intuitive sense of invention. Of course, photography is fascinating, in part, because it consistently blurs any line we try to draw between the presumably opposing notions of “fact” and “interpretation.”

Why make photographs of state capitol buildings? These structures are both physically prominent and intellectually unfashionable—an interesting combination. They are astonishingly rich symbolic texts—but texts written in a visual and metaphorical language that has become remarkably “foreign” to most of us. The ideas and images that previous generations easily understand appear to many today as quaint, obscure, or simply irrelevant. This process of cultural forgetting calls, I think, for some form of remembrance and re-imagining.

I am interested in both the physical and symbolic experience of these buildings. Some of these spaces powerfully embody the notion of a “secular cathedral.” The scale of these enclosures, the solemnity of their design and decoration, the often hushed atmosphere, and the careful orchestration of light all combine to create a contemplative, even reverential, state of mind. But, of course, capitols are not churches—they are utilitarian structures devoted the often messy and contentious business of politics. I have attempted to convey some sense of this complexity in the pictures.

My interest in symbolic expression is also conveyed in the images of statues, paintings, photographs, and inscriptions that are intended to inform, commemorate, and inspire. For me, at least, these images and artifacts raise many more questions than we can even begin to answer. How has our thinking about our collective civic life changed in the past two hundred years? How do we think about history: are we products of, or refugees from, the past? Can we take anything but an ironic attitude toward “traditional” notions of greatness, heroism, and virtue? How have the most intangible ideas—of democracy, leadership, or sacrifice, for example—been given symbolic form? What resonance and relevance do these ideas have today? Ultimately, I think, these structures have something important to say about our civic life and cultural memory.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Keith F. Davis is Curator of Photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and Chair, Art Selection Committee, Hallmark Cards, Inc., both in Kansas City, MO. Born in Connecticut in 1952, he received his B.S. degree (1974) in Cinema and Photography from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and his M.A. (1979) in the History of Art from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. In 1978-79 he held a research internship at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, NY.

He became Curator of the Hallmark Fine Art Collections in 1979, Chief Curator in 1987, Fine Art Programs Director in 1992, and Chair, Art Selection Committee in 2008. In these positions he expanded the Hallmark Art Collection to over 2000 paintings, prints, and dimensional works, and the Hallmark Photographic Collection to a present total of over 5000 works by 850 photographers. He has curated seventy exhibitions from the Hallmark art and photography holdings; these shows have been seen in over 300 individual bookings in leading museums across the U.S., and in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Great Britain, France, Spain, and Switzerland.

His various awards include a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1986-87) for his work on the Civil War-era photographer George N. Barnard.

He is the author of numerous books and catalogues, including: Désiré Charnay: Expeditionary Photographer (1981); Todd Webb: Photographs of New York and Paris, 1945-1960 (1986); Harry Callahan: New Color, Photographs 1978-1987 (1988); George N. Barnard: Photographer of Sherman’s Campaign (1990); Clarence John Laughlin: Visionary Photographer (1990); The Passionate Observer: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten (1993); An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital (1995); The Photographs of Dorothea Lange (1995); An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, 2nd edition, revised and expanded (1999); and American Horizons: The Photographs of Art Sinsabaugh (Hudson Hills, 2004); The Art of Frederick Sommer (2005); and The Origins of American Photography: From Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate, 1839-1885 (2007). His major essays include “A Terrible Distinctness: Photography of the Civil War Era,” in Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (1991), and “‘To Open an Individual Way’: Photography at the Institute of Design, 1946-1961,” in Taken By Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1937-1971 (2002).

In addition to lecturing widely on various aspects of 19th and 20th century photography, he has taught the history of photography at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

He has exhibited his own photographs intermittently since 1973. His work was featured in “Midwest Photography,” at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1981); “An Open Land: Photography of the Midwest, 1852-1982,” at the Art Institute of Chicago (1982); and in a solo exhibition at the Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City (2000).