Instagram Takeover: Sara Davidmann

Photoworks Annual Issue 24 contributor, Sara Davidmann becomes our next guest editor for our Instagram takeover, January 2018.

Follow us on Instagram instagram.com/photoworks_uk

Sara Davidmann is an artist/photographer. Since 1999 she has taken photographs and recorded oral histories in collaboration with people from UK trans and queer communities. Her work has been internationally exhibited and published.

Hi, Sara Davidmann here – @SDavidmann – taking over the @photoworks_uk Instagram this week on my project ‘Eve, Adam, and the Garden of Earthly Delights’. There are over 70 contact sheets which were made whilst I was working on the project. A selection of the photographs are featured in the Photoworks Annual published last month- the first public dissemination of the project. #igtakeover #SaraDavidmann #pwannual #Issue24. #photography

A post shared by Photoworks (@photoworks_uk) on Jan 5, 2018 at 6:47am PST

Hi, @SDavidmann here taking over the @photoworks_uk account this week on my project ‘Eve, Adam, and the Garden of Earthly Delights’. The photographs in the project were taken in my studio in SE London from 2007-2010. The photograph here is of one of my studio walls. When I’m working on projects my studio walls become plastered with images in connection with the thinking behind the project. Sometimes these generate further ideas because of the ways in which images interact and intersect with each other. #igtakeover #saradavidmann #pwannual #Issue24 #photography #karinbareman

A post shared by Photoworks (@photoworks_uk) on Jan 2, 2018 at 10:13am PST

Hi, Sara Davidmann here – @SDavidmann – on day 4 of my @photoworks_uk takeover on my project ‘Eve, Adam, and the Garden of Earthly Delights’. The picture here is of a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, ‘Cupid complaining to Venus’ 1525 from the National Gallery collection in London. I made the decision early on in the project that I wanted to use a photographic backdrop. I was thinking about the backgrounds of some of the paintings I have been drawn to- where the background creates a space that is unreal. For example, the paintings of Lucas Cranach the Elder – with their beautifully painted backgrounds and impossible bodies. I began my creative practice as a painter, moved into making sculpture, and then in 1999 I started to make photographs. The history of art and ‘the nude’ formed an important part of my early artistic development. The body – my own body and the bodies of others – has been a central concern in much of my work from the beginning. The ‘Eve, Adam, and the Garden of Earthly Delights’ project draws on my beginnings as a painter and my early interests. #igtakeover #saradavidmann #pwannual #issue24 #photography #karinbareman

A post shared by Photoworks (@photoworks_uk) on Jan 4, 2018 at 1:56am PST

Her recent project, Ken. To be destroyed, has been exhibited at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London (LCC/UAL) (2017) and Schwules Museum Berlin (2016). Both of these exhibitions curated by the writer and curator Val Williams with Robin Christian. Ken. To be destroyed was the focus of three events held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2015. It was exhibited at Belfast Exposed (2017); Museum of Liverpool (2014); Limewharf Gallery (2014); University of Victoria, Canada (2014); Photography and the Archive Research Centre, LCC, UAL (2014) and at the Unity Theatre for Homotopia’s 10^th Anniversary Arts Festival, Liverpool (2013).

Exhibitions include Extreme, with Catherine Faulds, Glass Tank Oxford Brookes University, (2015), Trans*_Homo Schwules Museum Berlin (2012), In/Visible Genders LGBT Centre Paris (2009), Somatechnics Sydney (2009), Transfabulous London (2007).

Publications include Ken. To be destroyed, edited by Val Williams, Schilt (2016), Crossing the Line, Dewi Lewis (2003), and she was guest co-editor with Elspeth Brown and Bruno Ceschel of a Journal of Photography & Culture Special Issue Queering Photography (2014). She contributed a book chapter to Transgender Experience Routledge (2014) and with Elspeth Brown she co-authored a journal article Queering the Trans Family Album, Radical History Review (2015).

She currently holds a Philip Leverhulme Prize. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Fulbright Hays Scholarship, four Arts and Humanities Research Council awards, an Association of Commonwealth Universities Fellowship and a Welcome Trust grant. Sara is a Reader in Photography at London College of Communication, UAL and a member of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) at LCC, UAL. She is the founder and convenor of the UAL Gender and Sexuality Research Forum.

Follow us on Instagram instagram.com/photoworks_uk

For more about Sara Davidmann’s work, click here and for other guest editors, click here. 

To learn more about Photoworks Annual, Issue 24 and get your own copy, click here.