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Albert Davis is alone in a slot canyon, the Upper Antelope Canyon of
northern Arizona, and he is counting the seconds. He stands between massive walls of
vertical rock, the sky
a thin sliver of light some fifty or sixty or seventy feet above him. One minute down, one
to go. In the near distance, something moves. Rock slide? Rattlesnake? Hiker? Davis looks
at his watch. He wants the shot done right, and that means a two-minute uninterrupted
exposure. Light drops through the lazy desert wind into the canyon, rising off its sandy
floor, feeding color into the walls, giving life to the void, the beautiful void. There is
a sensualness to this remote place, a sense of fluidness and vitality to the southwestern
rock that Georgia O’Keeffe drew upon so eloquently in her paintings. Click, and he
has it. Davis smiles in satisfaction, gazes at the majesty of nature for a long moment,
then moves the tripod to the next spot. In a few days, he will fly home and begin sorting
out the hundreds of slides that meet his standards from the thousands that do not.
Maps. It started with maps. “When I was in third or fourth grade, I wrote every state
for highway maps,” recalls Albert Davis. “Other kids had cars on their walls, I
had maps. They covered everything. We couldn’t afford to travel, so I learned about
the world from maps and encyclopedias. I guess, even then, I wanted to see the
world.”
Fifty years later, the 1960 Millsaps graduate has traveled through more than 50
countries and every U.S. state except the Dakotas. One might suspect that the scenery
would blur together after so many trips, but not for Davis. He has a detail-oriented mind,
and he has his photographs.
Not just a few photographs.
Not just a lot.
But plenty. 50,000 and counting.
Yet when one reviews his massive collection, its sheer size is not nearly as striking as
its quality, its diversity, its narrative core. Slide folder by slide folder, he has
documented a time and a place and a people against the backdrop of that fragile creature,
history.
“I don’t take postcard pictures,” Davis explains. “Mostly I focus on
landscape. I will take pictures of people, if they look different from me – from my
culture. I photograph indigenous people. I try to record a little bit of their lives
without interfering. Some of these cultures and places have not changed significantly for
hundreds of years, while others are literally passing away before our eyes.”
Though he sounds like a cultural anthropologist, Davis is actually a retired Coca-Cola
executive now living in Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from Millsaps with an
economics degree, he took a sales position with Coke in Columbus, Ohio, and stayed with
the soft-drink giant for 35 years.
In 1972, after switching from sales to marketing, Davis moved to Tokyo to become brand
manager of Coca-Cola in Japan. His success led to another promotion as brand manager over
all of the company’s brands in Japan, which then accounted for 25% of corporate
profits for the Coca-Cola Company.
“I loved the exoticness of Japan,” Davis says. “I was first exposed to
antiquities there and became more serious about my photography then.”
In 1983, Davis led a group of bottlers to Australia and New Zealand. He set his
slides from the trip to Australian music and held a slide show for the group at a meeting
in Atlanta. It was a hit. He has been choreographing his trips in this manner ever since,
weaving images and music together into nothing less than a brief cultural immersion
course.
“I bored my family to death with the early shows,” he admits. “They went on
forever! But they’re tighter now. And I take choosing the music seriously too –
Rachmaninoff’s Vespers accompany my Russian slides, for example.”
Davis came by his love of music naturally. His mother, Dorothy Davis, gave private piano
lessons in their home and taught at St. Andrews Episcopal Day School for 25 years. Though
Davis credits a colleague at Coke with pushing him toward classical music, a love of the
fine arts was an important part of his upbringing.
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