Ellie Davies Stars

Ellie Davies is a fine art photographer who completed an MA in photography at the London College of Communication in 2008. Davies has been working in the forests of the UK for the past seven years, producing work that explores the complex interrelationship between the landscape and the individual. Her career goes from strength to strength. In 2017, she won the Magnum Photography Award, Fine Art Category and The People's Choice Award at the Aesthetica Art Prize 2016 both for her Stars series. She has also been awarded prizes at many prestigious Art Awards, including 1st place in the 2015 Smithsonian Photo Contest. She was recognized at the Barcelona International Photography Awards - Top 50 Photographers 2015 and was the Selectors Choice of the Royal Photographic Society’s 2015 Annual Exhibition. Davies has also been awarded the Kontinent Awards (2014), Art Gemini (2014), the Professional Women Photographers International Juried Exhibition (2012), Lens Culture International Exposure Awards (2011) and the PX3 Paris Prix de la Awards (2010). Her work has been extensively exhibited in solo and group shows in The Netherlands, London, Paris, Budapest, Kyiv, Moscow, St. Petersburg, The Rencontres d'Arles and last year at The Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Center, Northern Ireland and the Houston Centre for Photography. Davies’s work explores the fabricated nature of the landscape by making a variety of temporary and non-invasive interventions in the forest, which places the viewer in the gap between reality and fantasy. Creating this space encourages the viewer to re-evaluate how their relationship with the landscape is formed, and the extent to which it is a product of cultural heritage or personal experience.

Find a broad range of photography on 1stDibs today.

The first permanent image created by a camera — which materialized during the 1820s — is attributed to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. The French inventor was on to something for sure. Kodak introduced roll film in the 1880s, allowing photography to become more democratic, although cameras wouldn’t be universally accessible until several decades later. 

Digital photographic techniques, software, smartphone cameras and social-networking platforms such as Instagram have made it even easier in the modern era for budding photographers to capture the world around them as well as disseminate their images far and wide. 

What might leading figures of visual art such as Andy Warhol have done with these tools at their disposal?

Today, when we aren’t looking at the digital photos that inundate us on our phones, we look to the past to celebrate the photographers who have broken rules as well as records — provocative and prolific artists like Horst P. Horst, Lillian Bassman and Helmut Newton, who altered the face of fashion and portrait photography; visionary documentary photographers such as Gordon Parks, whose best-known work was guided by social justice; and pioneers of street photography such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, who shot for revolutionary travel magazines like Holiday with the likes of globetrotting society lensman Slim Aarons.

Find photographers you may not know in Introspective and The Study — where you’ll read about Berenice Abbott, who positioned herself atop skyscrapers for the perfect shot, or “conceptual artist-adventurer” Charles Lindsay, whose work combines scientific rigor with artistic expression, or Massimo Listri, known for his epic interiors of opulent Old World libraries. Photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron was given a Kodak camera as a child. Later, she shot on Polaroid film before buying her first 35mm camera in her teens. Barron's stunning portraits of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Warhol and other artists chronicle a crucial chapter of New York’s cultural history.

Throughout the past two centuries, photographers have used their medium to create expressive work that has resonated for generations. Shop a voluminous collection of this powerful fine photography on 1stDibs. Search by photographer to find the perfect piece for your living room wall, or spend some time with the work organized under various categories, such as landscape photography, nude photography and more.