George Davison

(b Lowestoft, Suffolk, 1854; d Antibes, Alpes-Maritimes, 1930). English photographer. He was born into a working-class family and became an audit clerk in the Exchequer in London. He took up photography in 1885, when he joined the newly formed Camera Club in London. He soon became club secretary, a post he carried out with great distinction. This, and his growing reputation as a Pictorial photographer, led George Eastman to appoint him assistant manager of the Eastman Photographic Materials Company set up in 1889 in London. He became Managing Director of the re-formed Company, Kodak Ltd, a post he held until 1908. Davison was intensely interested in photography as a medium of artistic expression, and became a disciple of P. H. Emerson, whose theories of 'naturalistic photography', which proposed that photography should imitate natural vision by using soft focus for peripheral detail, Davison eagerly applied. Davison extended this into the development of a style of photographic Impressionism, in which the aim of the photographer was to convey the impression of, or emotional reaction to, a subject by the suppression of detail. In order to produce soft focus images Davison used pinhole, instead of lens, cameras and printing methods such as gum bichromate. Images such as the Onion Field (1890; see Newhall p. 144) played a central role in the debates concerning photography as a fine art. His photograph An Old Farmstead (1890) won the gold medal at the Photographic Society of Great Britain exhibition of 1890. Davison broke with the latter, however, and became a founder-member of the LINKED RING, a brotherhood of photographers committed to excellence in all styles of photography. Through his writings in English, French, American and other journals, Davison became a leading figure in PICTORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY. From 1911 Davison no longer took photographs.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Davison, George (1854-1930), British amateur photographer who joined the new Camera Club of London in 1885 and the Photographic Society in 1886. In 1889 he became a director of the Eastman Photographic Materials Company and gave up his civil service job, becoming managing director of Kodak Ltd. in 1900. Davison's upward mobility was tempered by old loyalties: his first exhibited photographs were of Lowestoft harbour, a tribute to his late father, a shipyard carpenter, and his first published letter in the photographic press proposed educational magic-lantern shows for workers. He later espoused anarchism, and his visibility on socialist marches led to his 1913 resignation from the Kodak board. Davison advocated equally progressive photography, most notably in his 1889 pinhole photograph An Old Farmstead (exhibited 1890), and his 1890 paper ‘Impressionism in Photography’, which updated P. H. Emerson's naturalistic photography in the optical and philosophical idiom of modern French painting. Davison was a founding member of the Linked Ring, and developed a liberal artistic and political community at his houses in North Wales and on the French Riviera, where he died.

— Hope Kingsley

Bibliography

• Coe, B., “‘George Davison: Impressionist and Anarchist’”, in M. Weaver (ed.), British Photography in the Nineteenth Century (1989)

George Davison may refer to:

• George Davison (photographer) (1854–1930), English photographer
• George Davison (merchant) (?–1799), businessman and political figure in Quebec
• George M. Davison (1855–1912), U.S. Representative from Kentucky

See also

• George Davidson (disambiguation)

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