William (Bill) Davis    (full name: William Cobb Boyles Davis)
Born January 1, 1943 in High Point, North Carolina. Resident of Taos, New Mexico since
April, 1969.

	Career as photographer coincided with the widespread availability of single lens reflex (SLR) cameras in the 1960's. Was starting his junior year of college (Fall, 1963) when Pentax introduced the H1a model which was a fully operational SLR at a budget price.
	"When I first tried it out in the store, I was enthralled as I watched the image go in and
out of focus in the camera's viewfinder while I focused the lens. For the next six years I traveled a lot and took pictures wherever I went. Beyond that, I knew little about photogra-phy and shot slide film almost exclusively because I loved color and the 35mm transparency was the closest thing to magic I could find. I concentrated on three films: Kodachrome II (later 25), Ektachrome, and the original Agfachrome CT-18 which, like Kodachrome, was a proprietary process film that had to be sent to Agfa for processing. It was my understanding that these films were the most stable form of color photography and therefore images made with them would be the most likely to survive over time. This proved to be true and today nearly all my transparencies which have not been lost, strayed, or destroyed retain much of their original color."
1964: Traveled to Mexico to attend the National University in Mexico City for the
		summer as part of college education.
1965: Graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with Bachelor's degree in Latin American 		History.
1967: Traveled to California; photographed Big Sur, Los Angeles, and of course Haight-		Ashbury in San Francisco.
	While in Los Angeles connected with the writings of David Vestal in an article
entitled Recipe for Seeing published in the newsstand photo magazine, US Camera.	"It made a distinct impression on  me--so much so that I dissected parts of it line by line, interpolated my own thoughts into it, and thereby created a treatise I titled Photography ad infinitum. The principles embodied in this early writing have guided me throughout my career."
1968: In the midst of all the year's political turmoil,  returned to California and eventually
 		settled in Mendocino on the northern coast.
1969: After spending fall and winter in Northern California, traveled to Taos, a well-known 		art colony located in the mountains of northern New Mexico.
	In Taos met Eric Kroll who had recently opened the One Loose Eye, Taos's first
photography gallery. Eric had been studying at the University of Colorado in Boulder and was showing the work of photographers coming out of college art departments which were beginning to include photography as part of their curriculums like in Boulder and especially at University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
	"It was the first photography gallery I had encountered and I took note that unlike my photographs, the pictures being shown there were all in black-and-white."

Summer 1970: Eric and Bill traveled north through Aspen, Colorado, to Denver, then 			northeast into Nebraska and the Midwest.
	In Denver,  Eric began to photograph girls who worked in rent-a-model shops,
businesses which flourished for a few years in the early '70's. These and subsequent pictures Eric made became a book,  Sex Objects, which documented the "regular human beings who worked in massage parlors and other roadside sex joints across America.'' It was published in 1976 with a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts. 12 years later, Eric would go into fetish photography and his coffee table book, Fetish Girls, published in 1994 by Taschen, would become a classic of the genre, selling 200,000 copies.
 	Went as far as Grinnell, Iowa, where they visited a photography commune headed by a man who had taught at Grinnell College. His name was Henry Wilhelm and he was just starting to emerge as a guru of the archival qualities of prints. He had recently written a booklet titled Processing Black and White Photographs  for Maximum Possible Permanence which was the first booklet to concentrate solely on  making photographic prints to archival standards. To this end he had also invented a compartmentalized print washer which allowed photographers to wash prints individually yet simultaneously in a single device. These were being manufactured in the basement of the house which was home to the commue. Wilhelm would go on to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981 for what became a "ten-year study of color print fading and staining under low-level tungsten illumination that simulates museum display conditions."  Today he heads Wilhelm Imaging Research, Inc., a world-recognized organization for ascertaining the permanence of different types of  photographic image reproduction, particularly inkjet prints."
1971: Bill made first trip into the Four Corners Region, driving into Utah from 
		Colorado and going through Hovenweep National Monument to Mexican Hat,  
		then into Arizona and over to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. This trip 		marked first visit to Valley of the Gods. 
1971-72: Spent the winter in the small town of Dixon which is located approximately 20 		miles south of Taos in the Rio Grande Gorge.
	So-called Winter of Discontent. After 2 1/2 years of living in Taos, where Bill had
created a darkroom and begun exploring black and white photography,  he spent the winter alone in Dixon, unsure of what path to pursue with his life. After months of soul-searching, he emerged in the spring of 1972 with a new commitment to photography. Bill moved back to Taos, resurrected his darkroom and plunged headlong into a serious pursuit and understanding of the photographic medium which continues to this day. 
1972: Began working with large format Linhof 4x5 camera. At the same time
 		continued making 35 mm color images of the Taos valley.
1972-1980: Made numerous trips to Valley of the Gods in Utah which became a major 		focus of his black-and-white photography. Created first Portfolio: Valley of 		the Gods in 1979, a one-of-a-kind work which featured a custom leather case 
		handcrafted by Taos artist Kevin Cannon.
1973: Produced first black-and-white body of work: Pages, a conceptual work made up 		of 72 photographs of newspaper clippings. This series was shown at Jila Gallery 		in Taos and Gallery f22 in Santa Fe.
1978: Received  first award, an Honorable Mention in the Southwestern 		Biennial in Santa Fe for a dye transfer print, Cedar Mesa Sandstone.
1979: Collaborated with Taos author John Nichols on the book If Mountains Die. 		Published by Alfred A. Knopf, it featured 65 of his color images of Taos and 		northern New Mexico,  remained in print for 25 years, and sold in excess of 		60,000 copies.
1980: Invited to participate in the Beaumont Newhall Selects show of photography 		which was part of the Santa Fe Festival of the Arts.
1981:  Fell in love and went to Denver to convince the person of his affections to 		return to Taos and marry him. It was during that winter and spring (1982) 		he began photographing the rapidly changing Downtown of the city of Denver, 		a project which continued off and on over the next 25+ years.
1982-86: Owner and director of DVS/Photographs, a gallery devoted to the showing 		of fine contemporary photography. Photographers shown at the gallery were an 		impressive cross section of the medium: Walter Chappell, Betty Hahn, 		Victor Landweber, John Pfahl, Jerry Uelsmann, Bernard Plossu, 		Cecilia Portal,  Ron Cooper,  Gus Foster, Chuck Henningsen, Shel 		Hershorn and Carm Little Turtle among them.
	Andrew Smith, who had been running a small photo gallery in Albuquerque's Old
Town, moved his operation to Santa Fe in the mid-1970's; David Scheinbaum and his wife Janet Russek opened a photo gallery in Santa Fe in 1980; in Taos Bill moved his small personal gallery, DVS/Photographs, to a larger space in 1983 and began showing the work of other photographers who had been attracted to New Mexico. Santa Fe became the new photography hub of the Southwest as photographic luminaries like Beaumont Newhall, Willard Van Dyke, Paul Caponigro, and Eliot Porter made their homes there. This period marked the maturation of photography in New Mexico.  Andy Smith, Scheinbaum & Russek, and Bill Davis all knew each other during this period and indeed even showed work in one another's galleries.

1982-87: Served on the Visual Arts Board of the Stables Art Gallery. In this capacity he 		curated two juried photography shows held at the gallery: Architecture of the 		Southwest in 1984 and Pueblos of New Mexico in 1986 the latter featuring a 		mix of contemporary photographs with historical images printed by Bill and Taos 		photographer Gus Foster from original negatives in the collection of the Taos 		Historical Museums. During this time, Bill worked with both Beaumont Newhall 		and Willard Van Dyke when they served as jurors for shows at the Stables Gallery.
1983: Produced Report From Uranus, a conceptual show created by putting photographs 		into a Sci-Fi context that radically altered their meaning. Premiered at DVS/		Photographs Gallery in summer of that year.
1984: Solo show, Christmas Eve at the Pueblo, featured pictures made at Taos Pueblo in 		1983 	during the famous Christmas Eve ceremony. Opened at DVS/Photographs 		Gallery, Taos, NM, where it was accompanied by a musical composition Esch, Fotia, 		Ignis written by Taos composer JoAnn Foreman and performed by singers John and 		Kathleen Kingslight.
1984: First Solo Museum show: The Last Romantic Days of Taos presented at the 		Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM.
1985: Included in: New Mexico, U.S.A., a book featuring the work of photographers 		living in New Mexico. Published by the Santa Fe Center For Photography,    		3 prints included.
1985: Hired by the Sangre de Cristo Community Mental Health Service to 		create a series 	of photographs to be used in publicizing the work of the 		organization in helping scores of mentally ill people living in Taos, Mora, and 		Colfax counties. The town of Las Vegas, NM, which is the site of the NM State 		Mental Hospital, had been inundated with dozens of ex-patients who had 		been discharged in a wave of cost-cutting measures and now were being 		warehoused in numerous quasi-official boarding facilities around the community. 
	"Las Vegas and the nearby community of Anton Chico were real eye-openers. What
we saw there were the kinds of things normally only seen on the nightly news or reported in major newspapers. It was not hard to get striking images, the hard part was not to be over-whelmed by the circumstances of these people who literally were at the mercy of their keepers. I shot in both color and black-and-white and made the requisite 8x10 glossy prints and sets of duplicate transparencies for Sangre, but something was missing. Afterwards I made a set of 16x20" black-and-white prints, but I wasn't satisfied with them either--they didn't convey the emotion of the experience; they were too sterile. So, I began toning them--just standard sepia--which helped, but still didn't provide the punch they needed.
	"Then I had an inspiration: what if I were to paint toners into various areas of the 22 prints?  Over the next nine months I spent hours sitting at a table in the darkroom painting various toners into different parts of wet prints until they achieved a kind of hand-colored look. This color, however, was not the result of paint on the print's surface, but of chemical reactions within the photo-emulsion itself. Surely I wasn't the first person ever to do such a thing, but I doubt few had ever attempted it on such a complex scale. Over the next 16 years I continued to experiment with this technique, adapting it to landscapes as well."

1986: First exhibition of completed series of these prints titled: La Gente de la Sangre 		shown at Philip Bareiss Gallery in Taos.
1986: Wrote introduction for the portfolio by Santa Fe artist/photographer  Barbara 		Erdman entitled: Reflections and Other Diagonals which featured her 		abstract color photographs of New York City.
1987: First photographer to be invited  to participate in the Taos Fall Arts Show.
1987: Vision '87, invitational photography show, Fine Arts Gallery of the New Mexico 		State Fairgrounds, Albuquerque, NM.
1989: Invited Artist, Contemporary Photography in New Mexico, curated by Van 	      Deren Coke, Stables Art Center, Taos, NM.
	Van Deren Coke had come to the University of New Mexico from Arizona in 1962
and was instrumental in making photography an equal part of the Visual Arts department there. By offering a Visual Arts degree in photography, UNM became prominent in the emergence of photography as an increasingly academic pursuit. This in turn made Coke a powerful arbiter in the photographic realm throughout the 1970's and '80's.

1989: Invited Artist, Portraits of New Mexicans, Governor's Gallery, State 	      Capitol Building, Santa Fe, NM, Dec 1989-Jan 1990.
1990: La Gente de la Sangre series exhibited at San Juan College in Farmington, 	      NM, accompanied by a Gallery Talk about the pictures.
1990: Invited artist, Night Moves, Invitational Show, Millicent Rogers Museum, 		Taos, NM, Dec 1990-Jan 1991.
1991-92: Accepted in Beyond Photography, a traveling show of photographs 		produced by the Laguna Gloria Museum in Austin, Texas and curated by 		Charlotte Kotik, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn 		Museum.
1991: Invited Artist, 21 Photographers From New Mexico, curated by Van Deren 		Coke for Vision Gallery in San Francisco, CA.
1993: Seventieth Anniversary: 1923-1993, Harwood Museum of Art, included 	      artist from Permanent Collection, Taos, NM, Nov 1993-Jan 1994.
1994:  Interview, Photographer's Forum magazine, Volume 16, No. 2, New Mexico
	       Photographers: Drawn To The Light, by Grace Schaub, with accompanying 	        photographs, February 1994.
1996: Lecture: Photography From Start To Finish, presented at the Millicent 		Rogers Museum, Taos, NM
1997: Taos and The Southwest, 1969-1997. Solo exhibition at the Fenix Gallery, 		Taos, New Mexico.
1998: Inspired Moments, invitational show, Lallak and Tom Gallery, Chicago, 		Aug-Sept 1998. 5 prints accepted.
1999: Poster Artist: 1999 Spring Arts Celebration, first photographic image to be 		used on a 	Taos Arts Festival poster.
1999: Photography Award, Taos Fall Arts Celebration Invitational Show, 		Taos Civic Center, Taos, NM. Blake Larson, Roswell Museum; Mary 		Stephenson, Artist-In-Residence; Terry Bumpass, Governor's Gallery, Jurors.
2000: Journey to the Edge of the World, a portfolio of ten photographs taken at 		Muley Point on Cedar Mesa in the sandstone country of southeastern 		Utah. Debuted in August at the Fenix Gallery, Taos, New Mexico.
	"Journey proved a very successful undertaking and sold well. In spite of the fact I had
photographed extensively at the spectacular edge of Cedar Mesa called Muley Point, I had never done a portfolio of my photographs from the area, instead simply selling images piecemeal over the years.  Journey was my first effort at assembling a group of these images into a single body of work."

2002: Outside the Gates of Eden. Subtitled: A Search for Answers, a portfolio of ten 	photographs taken at various places in the Southwest and on the West Coast in the 	months following the terrorist attack on 9/11. Debuted in July, 2002, at the Fenix 	Gallery, Taos. 
	"I awoke the morning of September 11th, 2001,  and switched on the news as I was 
having coffee. They were showing the Twin Towers in New York City. One had a plume of smoke streaming out of it. The announcer sounded confused and said that all that was known was that a plane had crashed into it. That in itself was shocking enough, but then a second plane struck the other tower and things took on a more sinister tone. Shortly it was announced that this was part of a terrorist attack. Eventually, as I watched transfixed, the towers abruptly crumbled to the ground one after the other, reduced to enormous piles of smoldering rubble in what seemed like mere seconds.
	"Like many people far removed from Ground Zero, I internalized this staggering event. Then over the next few months I began to see among the images I continued to make ones that seemed to bespeak a collective need for some sort of reassuring response to what had transpired. Ultimately I collected these into a portfolio which thereby became my response to this national tragedy."

2002: Photography Award, Taos Fall Arts Celebration Invitational Show, 		Taos Civic Center, September-October, Stephen Fleming, Director of Roswell 		Artists-in-Residence Program; Kathleen Howe, Curator of Prints and 		Photography, UNM Art Museum; Barbara Lucero-Sand, Professor of Museum 		Studies, IAIA, Jurors.
2004:  Sharp Shooters, interviews by Richard Mahler with 8 western fine art 		photographers, each with accompanying photograph, Southwest Art magazine, 		May issue.
2004: Moonscapes, images featuring the lunar presence made from 1969-2004, 		Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico, Oct 2004-Jan 2005.

2005: Photography +, annual contemporary juried invitational show, Mark Sink, 		curator, The Art Center, Grand Junction, Colorado, July-August, 2005.
2006:  Shoot Film and Scan, article with 6 accompanying photographs, Shutterbug 		magazine February 2006, Volume 35, Number 4, Issue 425.
2007:  Selected as a Living Master for the 2007 Fall Arts Celebration 		Invitational Show, Taos Civic Center, Taos, NM, September-October.
2009:  Altered Reality, A Digital Art Exhibit, Kim Wilson, curator, Blumenschein
 	         Museum, Taos, New Mexico, May 8-June 24, 2009. 
2011:   New Mexorado, a juried show open to artists living between Denver and 		Albuquerque, Libby Lumpkin, juror, two pieces accepted, Harwood Museum of 		   Art, Taos, NM,  March-June 2011.
2011:   Doren's Eye, Seventy Photographs from the A. Doren and Caroline Cornish 		 Collection, one image presented, Sechrest Art Gallery, High Point, NC,  March-			April 2011.
2013:   Selected as a recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award receiving the
 	           Mildred Talbot Photography Award at the 39th Annual Fall Arts Festival  		          Show, Taos Civic Center, Taos, NM September-October 2013.
2014:  The Photography of William Davis: the Power of Place, interview by Lorin Robinson 		    with 11 accompanying photographs, Shutterbug magazine, February 2014, 			  Volume 43, Number 04, Issue 521.

WORKS IN PERMANENT COLLECTIONS:

	Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
	Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico.
	Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
	Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
	Peter and Madeleine Martin Foundation for the Creative Arts, Taos, New
	  Mexico.
	Arnold Doren Archive, Jackson Library, University of North Carolina at
 		Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina.

In NM, Bill is represented by     David Anthony Fine Art
						   132 Kit Carson Road
						   (575) 758-7113

The David Anthony Gallery features fine furniture and selected works of art 
by some of Taos premier artists.