The town’s name is the title of Davis’ latest book, a collection of photos taken in Normaltown and elsewhere in Georgia between 2019 and 2024. (He has not returned since his family left in 1980.) Never in his 25-year career has Davis approached his work so autobiographically. “It was never about my inner world,” he told me. “It was always about the things and ideas that were there.” Indeed, aside from a few groundbreaking projects—including “The Permanent Collection,” in which part of an old painting’s smooth surface is erased by reflected light—and “Retail,” a collection of nighttime photographs showing corporate signage reflected in the windows of suburban homes and apartment buildings—Davis has always been the kind of person who gets around Davis has always been one of the kind of picture-makers who travel around, look what happens simply by taking a camera with them. “The best day of my life,” he told me, “is the day I get to take pictures all day long from the moment I wake up.”
For the Normantown project, Davis did not abandon his exploratory shooting style, which he likens to “foraging.” In 2017, he switched from a bulky 4 x 5-inch format camera to a more flexible 35mm digital camera, and if anything, he became more spontaneous. (This can sometimes work against him—the book, with nearly 200 images, might have benefited from a tougher edit.) But while similar recent works, like Davis’s 2021 Los Angeles picture book, have a surreal, cinematic, awe-inspiring quality, the images in Normal Town are more sombre, lonely, even haunted. In one image, a rusted car body miraculously hangs from the top branches of a bare tree, as if Davis had arrived after the biblical flood. In another photo, a jellyfish-shaped blob of melted ice cream leaks onto the sidewalk in the setting sun. A row of boys in uniform stood on the baseball field, their shadows stretched across the lawn like the tines of a pitchfork. The photo was taken from the high vantage point of an outsider, a ghost holding a camera.