Newsmaker

Every Friday, we choose an alum who has been making headlines—for better or for worse.
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Allison Davies ’99MFA

Allison Davies ’99MFA is a bit of a mystery woman. A professional photographer with a new book out, she seems to have no website, no Facebook presence, no Amazon page. And the book, Outerland, consists entirely of weird landscapes, a few of them containing Davies herself in a white spacesuit. No identifications, no explanations, no text of any kind. Wired, in a review this week, calls it “a welcome mixture of art and sci-fi” that provides “seeds for the viewers’ fantasies of distant worlds.”

Davies began the project as a student at the Yale School of Art in 1998. Her work, “under the tutelage of Gregory Crewdson” ’88MFA, “inspired the title for Another Girl, Another Planet, Crewdson’s seminal 1999 curated exhibition of female photographers working with constructed narratives,” Wired says, adding, “the show launched the careers of her classmates Taryn Simon, Katy Grannan, and others, yet for Davies, what followed was the slow continuation of a solo-planetary mission.”

Instead of achieving art-world fame, Davies became “an undercover private investigator for a Manhattan law firm,” shooting the book between assignments. The result, writes photography blogger James Danziger ’75, is “The Little Prince for the 21st century—a wordless visual inquiry into the mysteries of life.” But is there a baobab tree?

Filed under School of Art, visual arts
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