DAVIES
CHRISTOPHER

Since 10 when, in the darkness of his room, he experienced the phenomenon from the inside, Chris Davies is obsessed with photographic writing. Carried in the belly of his «Camera Obscura» and through a tiny hole, he witnesses the inverted and stunning spectacle of light projecting the exterior reality onto the wall of his room. Coming from a family of tennis players (his parents, champions, met at Wimbledon), Chris was born in France in 1964, practically racket in hand. Very soon a camera will take place in the other.

A few important encounters enabled him, alongside his career in tennis, to forge his personal practice of photography. In 1990, in Hamburg, he takes his first professional sports photos

for the newspaper Bild, and works as assistant to fashion photographer Axel Zajacek. Following collaborations with journalists, notably for the Revue du Golf de St Tropez in 1993, for Elle (Italy) with Delfina Vezzoli, who is writing an article about colonial houses in Goa in India and in Gente about the American writer David Leavitt.

Self-taught, his tastes lead him to compositions of a rather narrative style, related on one hand to cinema, on the other to lithography.
In 2009 he said goodbye to tennis, establishing himself as a photographer while continuing to draw from his daily life the material of his compositions: «Copy & Basta», which he exhibited the same year in Geneva, at the Asnières Gallery. In 2011 he exhibits his photographic compositions, on drawing paper, in Milan at Cristina Meriggi . In 2012 his series of « Lost balls & Broken faces », a series of thirteen tennis balls, made the subject of an article in the «Journal du tennis»(CarnetDeBalles) and an exhibition at the ATP tournament in Metz.

Lover of matter and faithful to street photography, he uses digital to get closer to drawing. With clean compositions on cotton paper, he tries to break with the usual coldness of photo prints. With the only use of an eraser, he forges with a couple of images who find their breath on a noble support. The photographic work becomes a living and delicate object.

He has just completed a photo-biography: "Soul'étude" which traces the saga of two families of tennis from which he came as well as his own personal and photographic odyssey. A book of 564 pages and more than 400 photos where words and photography dance in one voice. The book has won the 3rd price in the RDVi of Strasbourg in 2018.
Finally, Space balls is his last series dedicated to these tennis balls which this time travel in space as for as if to pass from one world to another. Many are of this transmutation and reincarnation journey.