b. 1854 or 1856; d. 1930
Davidson was active in photography at the turn of the century, when photographers were moving away from sharp images towards a more impressionistic type of photography, using differential focusing, sometimes entirely soft focusing. (See Impressionism.)
One of Davidson's main critics was Peter Henry Emerson, a brilliant but arrogant man who clearly had little regard for him, describing him as "an amateur without training and with superficial knowledge....He is... welcome to my cast-off clothes if he likes" - a rather unkind response to someone who had been an enthusiastic follower of Emerson's ideas on Naturalistic photography!
However, Davidson was evidently highly regarded by others, and his picture "The Onion Field" received much acclaim. That same year he was invited by the Royal Society of Arts to lecture on Impressionist Photography, something that established him as a leading figure.
In 1891 Davidson and others left the Royal Photographic Society to set up their own organisation, known as the Linked Ring, of which Davidson was an important founder-member. The Linked Ring was committed to promote photographic pictorialism.
Some of Davidson's prints, including "The Onion Field" are to be found in the quarterly Camera Work.
© Robert Leggat, 1999.