“At some point during my travels (1989-2010) in the Middle East I read 'The Journey of Ibn Battuta' by the great Egyptian writer Naguib Mafouz. I thought it was fiction. It was, but based on the real Ibn Battuta, the 14th century Muslim scholar & traveler. As I researched his life & journey I had no intention of repeating his twenty-nine year journey, but as life would have it I have more or less followed loosely in his footsteps. Sitting in a café in the Ibn Battuta Mall in Dubai I imagined this project. This exhibition is a part of the larger project. "I feel now is an excellent time to show these architectural gems that show the origins and treasures of these great cultures.” Lynn Davis, 2011
The favorite sources of the American photographer Lynn Davis are to be found in the age-old world of natural scenes and locations of ancient cults. The wonders of creation and large-scale sacred architecture force her to travel and inspire her to create highly personal images that, in their elegance, rival those of such predecessors as T.H. Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, and Carleton Watkins. Davies does not work as an explorer, and yet she has in common with the great of the past the invaluable pleasure to be found when contemplating spectacular, primordial formations. Lynn Davies goes to the very places painted on canvas or captured by the earliest cameras in order to discover the same miracle. Once there, according to need, she moves, runs back and forth, hires a camel, rides a horse, or works herself up on the bridge of a ship in order to seize the right light or the exact moment for a shot. The result is that her large-scale photos of the Egyptian pyramids or of the Colossus of Memnon reveal her affinities with the works of Gustave Le Gray, Maxime Du Camp, and Francis Frith, her Romantic predecessors from Victorian times who made a name for themselves by photographing ruins, ancient monuments, and sacred sites. And yet Lynn Davis is uninfluenced by the colonial-style exoticism which so interested these travelers: hers is not intellectual tourism but a spiritual pilgrimage. Her expeditions are never undertaken haphazardly but are carefully studied; they have led her to Greenland, Yellowstone Park, Giza, Thebes, Australia, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Yemen, India, Syria, Jordan, Iran, Turkey, Sudan, and Mali. These missions were a search for particular sacred geometries in the form of the circles, spirals, cubes, and triangles that are the basis of non-western religious architecture and that play such a large role in the structure of temples, pyramids, and stupas. Lynn Davis does not isolate these from their spiritual function but, rather, reunifies them in a condensation of form and spirit. Elisabetta Piatti, Editorial Staff, Zoom Magazine. The complete essay will be published by Studio la Città, Verona, Italy

Studio la Città, Verona
Lynn Davis: Modern Views of Ancient Treasures, Dans le Monde Arabe, In the footsteps of Ibn Battura
Opening Saturday December 10, 2011, 11.30am
through February 25, 2012
in collaboration with Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne
ZOOM magazine media partner