Joshua Chuang opens New York, 1975 with a city on the verge of insolvency: a national recession, the middle class fleeing to the suburbs, a fifth of the public workforce laid off, crime and drug use rising. Bevan Davies photographed what that condition left on the fabric of the place—sordid surfaces, improvised signage, cracked windows, dissident scrawls. The pictures are relentlessly frontal and clear-eyed. They are less a catalogue of ruin than a study of the ordinary surfaces through which a city becomes legible.
When the photographs were first exhibited in 1976, their formal austerity and apparent neutrality invited comparison with Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and other New Topographics photographers. Chuang argues that distance has changed the reading, placing Davies nearer Marville and Atget, who registered the life and death of buildings and therefore of place, and nearer Walker Evans. That realignment turns attention from taxonomic neutrality toward a slower, more elegiac regard for what a place leaves behind. The essay is a hinge rather than an afterword: it proposes that the photographs mean differently now than when they were made, and asks the reader to test that proposition against the plates.
The publisher calls Los Angeles, 1976, from NZ Library Set One, a companion volume, and presents New York, 1975 as Davies’s second monograph in the series. This book is a hardcover, slipcased edition of 350 numbered and signed copies, issued in Set Three, with 48 pages and 20 duotone plates. Chuang, a curator of photography at The New York Public Library, supplies the introduction. Davies’s work is held by the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, and the Nelson Atkins Museum.
The photographs were made in 1975 and shown in 1976, yet the body of work reaches book form only here. For a collector, that gap is the substance of the object. A sequence conceived for walls acquires a different argument on the page, with Chuang’s essay as interpretive anchor. This is not a retrospective consolidation but the first sustained opportunity to read a known exhibition body as a book, with the sequencing and pacing only the page permits. Its claim on attention is a matter of form, not reputation.
