scott b. davis: sonora gathers 93 images made in and around the Sonoran Desert into a 132-page hardcover from Radius Books. Davis, a Californian photographer, works between in-camera palladium paper negatives and traditional film-based platinum and palladium prints. The publisher describes the resulting landscapes as both literal and abstract, and that pairing is the project’s premise rather than a slogan: the terrain is recognizable, but the photographs refuse to settle into straightforward documentation of it.
The method behind the pictures is inseparable from their meaning. Davis exposes his materials to intense ultraviolet light, a process the publisher credits him with pioneering, which registers images invisible to the naked eye and produces prints of pronounced contrast. The effect pushes at the visible spectrum and at the perceptual limits of human vision, so the familiar daylight desert becomes something else when rendered as an abstract record of place. These are photographs that reward slow, close looking over instant recognition, and the book is built to sustain that kind of attention.
Grouping is central to the sequencing. The volume includes diptychs, triptychs, and occasional series running to ten or twelve unique images, which sets photographs into relation with one another instead of presenting them as isolated views. Across those configurations, the darkness and overwhelming light of the open desert acquire a structural rhythm, felt across spreads and sequences rather than in any single frame. The stated aim is not to reproduce the desert as we think we know it but to evoke an intimate connection with it through unfamiliar perspectives.
An essay by Joshua Chuang and an interview by Virginia Heckert accompany the plates, giving the volume written as well as photographic material through which to approach Davis’s work. Published at 10.8 by 12.4 inches, the format is sized to carry the multi-part works. For collectors of contemporary landscape photography, the book’s interest lies in that combination of process, print tonality, editorial structure, and physical scale, all serving a sustained investigation of visibility rather than a portfolio of single images.
