Suburban monuments, cats and gladiators shot in all their glory by Tim Davis

Tim Davis’ series The New Antiquity is a combined record of his life in New York, and trips to Italy and China where he photographed objects, people, situations and landscapes in the suburbs surrounding ancient, and not so ancient, cities. He describes these suburbs as “ruins in the making,” spaces that could really be anywhere, “flooding across national borders.”

Comparing the architectural “sameness” of the suburbs to that of the Imperial Roman habit of shipping marble across continents in an effort to decorate their bathhouses consistently, Tim identifies the essential difference as being “the virulent spread and ruin of suburbs”, that occurs before they can be chronicled.

Tim’s aim for The New Antiquity was to “pour little moulds of meaning for the peripheral present to harden it [and] document a very real faux-archaeological significance of a very recent ancient past.” And it works, the photographs are surreal. His depictions of a viaduct, a golf course, a castle view from a car park and a cat amongst rocks with a paper figure of Charlie Chaplin all have a sense of scale, depth and accuracy that confuses your sense of the historical real by just the right amount. The series is funny and beautifully shot but it also makes a pointed observation about how we can let our present go to ruin.