Street Scenes

Adam Davies studied painting before switching to large-format photography. Adam received an EdM from Harvard University and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a recipient of grants from the American-Scandinavian Foundation and the DC Commission on the Arts and has attended residencies at the Chinati Foundation, Creative Alliance, Fine Arts Work Center, and Yaddo. In 2015, Adam was named as Outstanding Emerging Artist at the DC Mayor’s Arts Awards and was the recipient of the Clarence John Laughlin Award. His exhibitions have featured collaborations with Los Angeles-based musician Alex Zhang Hungtai and Baltimore-based percussionist Adam Rosenblatt. He is currently working with two award-winning authors: Joan Wickersham on a project based upon the 17th-century Swedish shipwreck Vasa and Ivy Pochoda on an exploration of the annual wildflower bloom that borders the highways in downtown Los Angeles. In 2019 he presented his project, Reroutings, at the Mid-Atlantic TED Talk in Washington, DC.

It was an honour and a pleasure to jury Street Scenes and to work with the Maryland Federation of Art. When I think of the topic “street scenes”, my thoughts immediately go to images that surprise or reveal unexpected juxtapositions. Fundamentally, the street is a shared public space that encourages interaction and exploration. While it has structure, it is a place that cannot be controlled. From urban to rural imagery, I looked for submissions that made me curious and encouraged me to look deeper and more closely. I was drawn to works that had a strong sense of colour and design as well as to works that seemed to create a narrative. It was important that they had an inner cohesion, that all elements in the image or object made sense or supported the story. The selected works provide a diversity of imagery and points of view. They include images of streets that range from the chaotic to the deeply structured, from intimate, private stories to the massive and overwhelming spaces of the “bright lights” and the “big city”!