Outerland

Since completing her photography MFA at Yale in the late nineties, Allison Davies has assumed many guises. Between intermittent assignments as an undercover private investigator for a Manhattan law firm, she has been quietly slipping away from a career fraught with risk to make landscape photographs and ambiguous self-portraits of haunting beauty. In Outerland, her debut collaboration with Charles Lane Press, Davies reveals for the first time her personal work of more than a decade. Portraying herself as a solitary wanderer in the spectacular vistas of alien worlds, she appears only obliquely in her images, veiled in a spacesuit of her own design. As Davies traverses the beautiful but deadly topography of Outerland, her purpose is unclear. What is the meaning of the strange insignia on her suit? Are the instruments she carries with her-and with which she subtly alters the landscape-for science or survival? Where exactly is Outerland, if it is not in fact a harsh and dystopian vision of our own planet deep in the future? Presented without text or explanation of any kind, and with only a handful of mysterious symbols to help us orient ourselves in Davies' imagined cosmos, Outerland offers a compelling new perspective on self-portraiture within the continuum of modern landscape photography. Outerland is the second book in Charles Lane Press' carefully curated, one-a-year titles. Lushly printed in a large horizontal format with a unique Tyvek and gold foil-stamped binding, Outerland was edited by photographer Richard Renaldi and consists of 65 full color plates.