Hallucinations.

Photographs by Tim Davis.

punctum, Rome, Italy, 2022. 144 pp., 128 color photographs, 8x11¾".

Sale copies have slight cornerbump to the upper, opening side of the book. They are offered at 10% off.

“Everything the camera sees is a hallucination, overwriting and surpassing everything that has come before. And every photographer is looking for that hallucination, that feeling that the ebb and flow of the world can leap into a frame and announce that it has an important meaning.”

— Tim Davis

"What does Sardinia look like today? What a useless question – or perhaps just a poorly phrased one. Sar-dinia, whatever it is and whatever it was, is always itself – the images that portray it healthy bearers of varying degrees of adherence to reality, as the need arises. The Island of Remorse (almost) never disappoints the gaze of others. Its genetic traits change with the times, and remorse at times becomes contemporary regret: there are horses, vineyards and saints, sos bezzos, sos zovanos and sos mortos (in Sardinian: the old, the young and the dead); the beautiful sea and the burnt cars. There is the unfinished Sardinian and the scorched earth, the cantoniere houses and the garbage, the time that stands still and the advancing new, there is loneliness, and there is that tragic and almost heartbreaking beauty of abandonment that is also constant resistance.

Tim Davis arrived in Sardinia in the summer of 2021 after an enforced sedentary period of nearly two years due to the pandemic. An artist of image and word, his visual quest is (also) a semiotic quest characterized by the celebration of God in the hidden details; his books are visual poems, his photography one of observation and redemption, a constant search for the poetics of the banal and the usual that has found fertile ground on the island. He is the latest to try his hand at Voyage en Sardaigne, but he is substantially devoid of the fetishizing gaze that has so characterized the other's outlook on Sardinia and its inhabitants. Tim Davis's gaze is genuinely curious, bittersweet and amused, hallucinatory in the best sense of the word: the look of someone who didn't quite know what to expect but had faith and began to dance; and was confronted by a land wearing a sardonic mask, its streets inebriated yet perpetually thirsty and its landscapes infused with a suffused, out-of-time pain, the pieces held together with nylon twine. A vague whiff of jimson weed."

— Elisa Medde

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