ADAM DAVIS: BLACK MAGIC
Adam Davis is an artist and photographer from Los Angeles, California, who is the genius behind the Black Magic project. The Black Magic project is a collection of Adam’s style of photography: tintype portraiture. For those who don’t know, tintype is an old photograph style that has a photographic on a fine metal sheet with a coating of enamel or dark lacquer. It’s also known as ferrotype or melainotype.
So, Adam’s Black Magic project is a collection of 54 photographs that he has taken, all of which are of the tintype style. These images are mostly portraits of various Black people from his community, while some are of skateboards and custom decks of cars.
Source: Black Magic by Adam Davis
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Adam Davis mentioned how he now mostly takes pictures of Black people, and that practice is not always well-received by other people around him. Nevertheless, he’s still focused on highlighting the people of his community, which is precisely what the Black Magic project is doing. It is a celebration of Black people, as he himself has described. The lack of Black representation in shows and other artistic pieces made him want to change that.
What’s also interesting about the Black Magic project is the way in which the people are represented. His tintype style creates almost a halo around their heads due to the exposure of the light. One could argue how that offers a unique perspective of the subjects of his art—something more than just the ordinary.
Source: Black Magic by Adam Davis
The Black Magic project is not the only work he wants to create in the service of Black people. He plans to create 20,000 tintype portraits of African Americans. That will be one of the largest collections of portraits of African American people in contemporary art. He aims to get his pictures from different parts of the country for a more expansive representation of the Black population. In addition to that, he’s focusing on touring historically Black cities for these portraits, which include Chicago, Detroit, and Tulsa. That dedication is indicative of his testament to making an impact on Black communities in different parts of the United States and moving them toward a possibly better future.
Other than this project, Adam Davis has already managed to make a name for himself as an LA artist. He has currently hosted two solo exhibitions where he got the opportunity to showcase a wide body of his work.
Davis’s direction of focusing specifically on the African American experience was not always the case. When he started out, he took pictures of “everything,” as he explained in his interview with the LA Times. However, when he did shift his direction, he wanted to celebrate Black people and their culture in the most authentic way possible. That also meant shunning his own ideas and bias against certain aspects of Black communities that he may originally have considered regressive. Shifting that bias and focusing on what people feel and how they live their lives has managed to give him a more enriched take on African American people’s experiences, and that shows in his work.
