Owen Davies, Light/Mass

Los Angeles, California, USA

Please introduce yourself—what is your name, where are you from, what do you do?

Hi! I’m Owen Davies and I’m a Photographer and Creative Consultant originally from Hertfordshire in the UK, but I’ve been based in Brooklyn, NY since 2020.

What is your relationship with photography, and how did you get into it?

I came to photography fairly late—around my mid-20s. I was never really into it as a kid and it was well before camera phones, so I would only take the odd picture with my dad’s camera at family gatherings or holidays. As a teenager I was more into making music, so I guess I got my creative fix from that!
 
It wasn’t until I took a road trip along the West Coast of the United States that I started to get interested in photography. I’d taken a point and shoot with me for holiday snaps and it had a few manual settings you could use. I got really into playing around with long exposures and using the different colour profiles to record all these new places I was experiencing. I came home with a ton of pretty average photos, but there were a few in there that I really liked and I knew I wanted to make more. 
 
From there I upgraded to a DSLR and would take it with me on day trips and vacations. I was mostly shooting landscapes then, but would take a photo of the occasional building that interested me. 
 
As I started taking photography more seriously I decided I wanted to study with the goal of finding work in the industry. I did a part-time HND course in Commercial Photography where I learned how to light with strobes, take portraits and create still life images. From there I got a job as an assistant photographer with an e-commerce company shooting luxury watches and jewellery. I stayed there for 7 years, working my way up to head of the creative department and shooting freelance work in my spare time. 
 
I moved to NYC in 2020 with the intention of going full-time freelance, but the pandemic put a pretty quick stop to that! Luckily my work had moved more into art direction and branding by then, so I was able to work from home with a few clients and focus on making personal work in my photography. This is the first time I’ve properly dedicated time to pursue the artistic side of my photography—I’m finding it very rewarding and exciting!

What do you think triggers you to photograph in a certain moment? Is it planned or solely driven by intuition?

Early on I was shooting spontaneously, taking my camera along with me if I was going somewhere interesting—a day trip, an event or holiday. I had no real plan on what to photograph and just shot things that caught my attention. I think as I was shooting to brief in a studio all week I was happy to not have a plan when taking photographs for myself.
 
Over the past two or three years though, I’ve made much more of an effort to photograph with purpose and I’ve been creating work with a narrative in mind. I’ll research subjects, plan visits to and choose the time of day where I’m going to get the best light. It’s something I’m finding very rewarding as I feel like each time I go out I’m building towards a body of work. I’ve never been one to fire off 100’s of frames when I shoot and I feel I’m even more selective now. I’ll still take a camera with me on a walk, but if I don’t see anything I want to photograph, it’ll stay in my bag. 

What is the story you want your pictures to tell?

My recent work has been centred around creating what I see as alien urban landscapes featuring oddball architecture that I find across the US. I moved here pretty much as the pandemic started, so I spent a lot of time wondering around near-empty streets surrounded by incredible buildings. I found that I was drawn to a lot of modernist architecture, which already has a weird, space-age quality to it and without any people on the streets, to me they looked like scenes from a sci-fi movie. I leaned into that quite a lot and now I’ll shoot my subjects and remove any people to keep the feeling of the earlier images.

I think the buildings I’m drawn to tend to be seen as boring or ugly by most people, so by shooting them in this way I hope to show that there’s a lot of beauty in them and that they’re pretty incredible when you take a good look. There’s a lot more to NYC architecture than the skyscrapers! 

Which city would you like to visit the most, and why?

I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of NYC and then there’s all the other strange architecture to be found in cities throughs the country. There’s certainly plenty of subject matter for me still to explore.

That said, I’ve wanted to visit Tokyo for a long time, so being able to go and create similar work over there would be a dream!

What is your personal relationship to cities, and how do you perceive them as places in general?

In the UK I lived in a small town around 30 minutes from London, making it the city I spent the most time in growing up. That being said, I only ever felt like a visitor as I never lived there. I enjoyed exploring London, but I didn’t feel much compulsion to make photographs as I’d either be somewhere for work or in a touristy area that had been photographed millions of times.

It wasn’t until I moved to Brooklyn that I began to make work that was rooted in the city experience. Partly that was down to not being able to travel due to Covid, but it meant that I could take my time exploring New York and find things to photograph that I simply wouldn’t have noticed as a tourist. I found interesting buildings, light reflections and gradual changes to areas I’d walk through regularly that I wouldn’t visit as tourist, or just wouldn’t notice from a single visit.

I never really saw myself living in a large city, I enjoyed visiting them and being able to leave for somewhere quieter. Now though, I’ve realised how much living here inspires me to make work. Being able to spend more time and dig deeper into aspects of New York I like to photograph, there’s always something else to discover. There’s the well-worn cliché of New York having this energy that few other cities possess, and it’s true! From the architecture to the people and the number of opportunities to experience pretty much every kind of art form you can imagine. It’s incredibly inspiring. I’ve done a complete 180 and now can’t imagine living anywhere else! 

Regarding your project Light/Mass: What was your intention, and how did you come up with the idea?

Light/Mass came about through my early explorations of New York during the pandemic. I had loads of free time and I’d just moved to a new city where nothing was open, so the only thing to do besides watching movies was to go out and walk or cycle with my camera.

I started noticing these odd-looking buildings dotted around the city. They’d sometimes just appear between some apartment blocks or loom suddenly when rounding a corner. I was drawn to how they appeared both futuristic but also old and worn. They struck me as almost alien, like they didn’t belong there but had somehow existed for a long time. Lots of New York looks like a movie set—often because it really is—and I felt like I was stumbling onto sets from dystopian sci-fi movies. This was exaggerated by the fact there were barely any people on the streets, so I began seeking these scenes out and photographing them.

The other element that drew me to these buildings was the way they interacted with the light. The light over here is much different to back home. There’s a certain crispness on a bright sunny day that just isn’t there in the UK and it looks incredible when it hits the large concrete expanses I tend to shoot. The textures come to life under the hard sun and the shadows create interesting geometric patterns all over the building and the ground around it.

Once it was safer to travel, I started to look for similar buildings in other cities on the East Coast. There’s an abundance of modernist buildings here, so I’ve been slowly making my way around the country and photographing buildings to add to the project. I’m not necessarily tied to modernist architecture for the project, but that style ,as well as its evolutions such as Brutalism, seem to fit the mould for Light/Mass pretty perfectly.

Now most things have returned to normal and the tourists are very much back in the city I’ve needed to adjust my shooting style to get the same eerie feel that I loved in the early images. I shoot very slowly, much like when I work in the studio, on a tripod and use a combination of long exposure and photoshop to remove people from the scenes and draw as much attention to the building itself in the image.

By doing this I’m hoping to blur the lines of reality and show a building that’s very much real, appear otherworldly. 

Which project did you never finish?

I did start a still life project photographing my watch collection a few years ago. I wanted to do a personal project, but at the time didn’t have many ideas beyond what I was shooting for work, so it felt like an obvious choice. I got a little way into it, but kind of just got bored and by then I’d sold and bought other watches that I hadn’t shot. Maybe I’ll go back to it one day!

What is that one thing you have never managed to photograph and is now gone for good?

A few of the watches I used to own that I’ve since sold. They were all vintage pieces, so even if I were to buy another of the same model, the wear and patina wouldn’t be the same. I’m not exactly going to loose sleep over it, but I’m a little annoyed I didn’t just photograph them for record’s sake. 

On the other hand, I’ve since found out that one or two of the buildings I’ve included in Light/Mass have been scheduled for renovation, so I now have a record of them in their original state, which I find pretty cool!

If you could travel back/forth in time, what advice would you give your younger/older self?

Probably an instruction to photograph those watches before I sold them! Other than that I don’t think I’d want to interfere. I feel like the choices I’ve made have led me to where I am now, so I wouldn’t want to mess with that—I’ve seen Back to the Future! 

What do you prefer saying: «to take a photograph» or to «make a photograph», and why?

I change between both in conversation, but I prefer to say make because it sounds more involved - I’m making an image to show someone how I perceive what’s in front of me and my camera. Taking a photograph sounds more like an impulsive snapshot to me. Nothing wrong with it, but I don’t think it describes my process in the same way. I’ll often spend time walking around and exploring my subject before I even set up the camera. I see this just as much a part of the image making process as framing and pressing the shutter button.

What is the most interesting experience you have had while photographing?

I almost always photograph my subjects alone and I’m often stood in an empty parking lot or the side of the road, so the opportunities for interesting moments are pretty rare! I do really enjoy being in the presence of my subject though. When the light is just right and everything quietens down, you can start to study the details of the building and how it interacts with the surrounding area. 

If it wasn’t for photography, what would you be interested in doing instead?

Well I can’t paint or draw for my life, so I don’t think it would be anything image-based! I was really into making music when I was younger, so I’d probably be still doing that. I find it to be a very different creative process to photography, much more spontaneous and driven by how I’m feeling in the moment. I still write now and then. I tend to move back and fourth between music and photography—when I’m making progress with one, I’ll give the other a go. 

How would you describe one of your pictures to a blind person?

You reach out and feel a solid, rough texture. Warm to to the touch as though it’s been baking in the sun for many days. The air is still and you can sense something large, something monumental looming in front of you. What strikes you as strange though, is the absence of any noise. It is unsettlingly silent but for the low drone of the city, somewhere in the distance. 

What are you currently working on, and—if there is—what is your next project or journey?

I’m still adding new work to Light/Mass. There’s loads of weird architecture in The Sates that would be perfect for the project, so I’ll slowly chip away at it.

My other project that I’m working on is called The Great Outsiders which documents the modernist architecture of the US National Parks. Scattered throughout the country are these surreal visitor centres that look like they should belong in cities and suburban areas, but are instead built amongst some of the most beautiful wilderness areas of the United States.

The were constructed as part of a billion dollar public spending program called Mission 66, which enabled the parks system to cope with increased visitors, but I also see it as a bold demonstration of governmental power at a time when the US was competing on all fronts with the USSR. There are a lot of parallels with Soviet-era architecture and it’s use for propaganda and I’m really enjoying exploring all these elements to the work.

I’m about a quarter of the way through and am seeking funding to complete the project, so if you’re reading this and like to invest in photography, let’s talk!

Thank you, Owen!

Editorial Notes:

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Photography: Owen Davies
Location: multiple locations

Links: Website, Instagram,

Los Angeles, California, USA

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