Book (Pre)view: Dave Ferrie, All things Pass into the Night

All Things Pass into the Night is a line from Q Lazzarus’s one wonderful hit, Goodbye Horses. It is also the title of Dave Ferrie’s next photobook. The book tells of nine frenetic New York City days and nights of firing on all digital cylinders. Ten thousand exposures later, how does anybody make sense of it all?

Before leaving for the big apple, inspired by old school monochrome greats William Klein, Daido Moriyama and Ed Van Der Elsken, Dave had a loose idea that he would make a small book of black and white photographs revealing contemporary New York City as seen through his twenty eight year old South Lanarkshire eyes. Success was not guaranteed, adventure was. He left Scotland with a compact digital camera, an Airbnb booking and the promise of some big nights out with an old pal working a city bar just below the radar of Trump’s less than welcoming immigration policies.

In the city Dave encountered and photographed streets, people, high rise buildings, a Cameroonian man who bemoaned the Scottish ‘No’ vote, graffiti, teddy bears and a loved up couple getting naked together on their fire escape balcony. The free spirited young couple proved a gift of chance whose story unfolds as a recurring sub-plot within the work. Once home Dave trawled through his ten thousand JPGs converting anything worthwhile into monochrome, adjusting contrast levels to suit. That reduced the conundrum to around two thousand images. Lewis Baltz once remarked that photography works the opposite to other art mediums. Instead of beginning with a blank canvas and adding things in, you begin with everything and make decisions about what to exclude. That sentiment is amplified for practitioners of digital photography who choose to take advantage of its properties to make images in high volume and edit hard and fast afterwards. Dave’s second cull dropped the set worthy of consideration for the book down to five hundred. He shared some of the photographs with the ‘Fresh Focus’ group he is a part of at Stills Gallery in Edinburgh. He spooled through the photographs on his computer and felt dejected with feedback that probed the question of meaning. “What are you trying to say Dave?” Dave wasn’t trying to say anything in particular, instead he was trying to discover something he couldn’t quite put his finger on but could eventually form into a photo book that works. 

Dave is all about darkness and light, pessimism about how fucked up the world is mixed with indefatigable if somewhat futile defiance. He has written a self-immolating, full stop-less, text for the book. It is so raw that it burns under the skin. Anyone who has ever been on a marathon alcoholic bender and stood bent double in the street the next morning, retching and hoping against hopelessness, will connect the dots between the words and the pictures. Dave made a photo book on his computer without even thinking to make physical prints. He considered stand out images and pairings as a way to form hooks and begin sequencing. He considered which photographs, though good, were just too clichéd to make the final cut. He even considered keeping the series of the young couple completely separate from this project. In the end he settled for a jigsaw puzzle of a book where the pieces fit together just right. The text places Dave in the story on an equal footing with the people he photographs. The man from Cameroon introduces a different spin on globalisation from the crush of faceless corporations hinted at, and the cavorting young couple offer an exhilarating and humorous release from the darkness of the streets and Dave’s spew of words. To paraphrase Edmund Husserl, ‘pictures do not have to explain themselves’. Photographs are not language. By placing photographs and text together within the container of a book, layers of meaning and loose narrative are built up. But there is no fixed message laid down by the author, only stories for the reader to conjure from what they see.

Dave Ferrie loves life and embraces it with a digital camera in his hand. He flips the bird at the slowness of analogue, pulls himself upright on the sidewalk, and shakes his fist at Trump and the ‘suits’ he loathes even as he fears they may have something over him. Dave swims in the tsunami of images and carves out his own subjective truth to serve up raw and jolt us from complacency. Dave’s process does not emerge well schooled from an art institution but it works for Dave and, as for his angel…. well…. pick up the book to find out…. All things Pass into the Night.

Note: A selection of Dave’s photographs will be shown as part of the ‘Fresh Focus’ group show at Stills Gallery in Edinburgh from June 7^th to 17^th 2018. His self-published book will be launched at Stills on Saturday June 9th in an initial print run of one hundred copies.


All images © Dave Ferrie