David Campany

Life and work

Campany grew up in Essex. He gained a degree in film, video and photographic arts from the Polytechnic of Central London and an MA in photographic studies from the same school, by then renamed University of Westminster.

In the 1990s he taught histories of art and graphic design at Winchester School of Art. From 2000 to 2004 he taught photographic theory and practice at Surrey Institute of Art and Design. He became a reader in photography at the University of Westminster in 2004.

He lives in north London with his wife, Polly Braden, and two daughters.

Campany's book Gasoline (2013) received attention upon its publication and was positively reviewed by critics. It consists of photographs of prints of petrol stations from 1945 to 1995 rescued from archives of several American newspapers that have been discarding their analogue print collections in favour of digital storage, and edited into a visual meta-narrative. Most of the photographs have been marked by the grease pencil of a newspaper's art director, outlining the crop required to illustrate a particular story, or stories, in the newspaper. They are often heavily retouched by hand, painting selectively over the image with white-out and pen. The second half of the book consists of pictures of the reverse of the prints, showing caption information, the name of the photographer and copyright holder, dates of publication, the newspaper, and sometimes clippings from the image's use in the paper, an archive of its own use which is lost in a digital archive. As well as being "elevated to icon in the visual language of 'America'", gas stations "are quite banal but when they make news it's because there's been a crime, an accident, a price rise or a geopolitical crisis" which "makes the gas station a revealing measure of a society over the second half of the 20th century". The book describes "America's relationship with the car, with travel, with consumption, with the rest of the world" and can also be read as "an allegory about news photography. Or a minor history of car design, or vernacular architecture, or street graphics, or outfits worn by pump attendants. All of the above."

Walker Evans: the Magazine Work (2014), edited and with "an exhaustive essay" by Campany, explores the period of Evans's photographic career at Fortune and other magazines, a period that has gone largely unnoticed, with Evans "lauded for every part of his creative career except for his magazine work." Krystal Grow, writing in Time, praised Campany's book as "Exhaustively researched and meticulously edited".

In The Open Road: Photography & the American Road Trip (2014) Campany introduces the road trip as a photographic genre, the first book to do so. It includes writing by Campany and photographs by Robert Frank (from The Americans), Ed Ruscha, Inge Morath (from The Road to Reno), Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz, Jacob Holdt (from American Pictures), Stephen Shore, Bernard Plossu, Victor Burgin (from US 77), Joel Sternfeld, Shin'ya Fujiwara, Alec Soth (from Sleeping by the Mississippi), Todd Hido, Ryan McGinley, Justine Kurland, and Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs (from The Great Unreal).

Campany co-founded and co-edits PA magazine with Cristina Bechtler. In each issue an artist is invited to select and sequence their own work and select a second artist who does the same, possibly with a dialogue about their practice.

Publications by Campany

Publications with contributions by Campany

PA magazine

Awards

Exhibitions curated by Campany

Solo exhibitions

Exhibitions with others

Group exhibitions

Television appearances