Sara Stevenson

Throughout a most distinguished career, David Williams’ ideas have flowed in works of beauty, poise and lyricism. Having spent his early creative years as a musician, his camera work lies happily within a world of music, reconnecting our often overfocussed eye with hearing and the manifold realities of our world.

Williams is a master of observation. He possesses the skill to see and predict the tiny shifts in movement and time, which enable an image to be held and, more importantly, for that still moment of decision to express life. Williams’ portraits have the same expansive quality. In commissioning him, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery was always rewarded and enlightened. In his images are the individual and the life, and more. He engages empathetically with his sitters, and offers us their humanity, filtered through his intelligence.

The camera is not an efficient tool. It is wayward, perverse and unnatural. A photograph may be a brilliant thing in itself; but more often it is like a single chord – hanging ragged with questions. Our obsessive measurements of time, such as the 1/125th of a second shutter-speed, are outside human critical experience. We need to remember that Henri Cartier-Bresson – the proponent of ‘the decisive moment’ – was a surrealist, and this understanding opens the way for photography to be a construct and an important art form.

For over forty years, Williams has illuminated the practice of still photography, using a range of strategies on projects increasingly informed by the desire, in his own words, ‘to allude to unicity… and to reconcile and integrate apparent opposites’. In this respect, the notion of dialogue within and between photographs is pivotal. Consequently, image juxtaposition, seriality, typology and more recently the use of still image in slow-dissolve video, all play their part in his practice.