David Knox has traveled throughout the American South documenting the region for 30 years. He specializes in 19th-century photo processes and digital collage. His current work combines his photography with historic imagery to create large-scale, multi-layered photomontages in the realm of historical fiction. These pieces, through visual storytelling, explore the lives of those who inhabit this arcane netherworld set somewhere in the mid-19th-century South.

Knox completed his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005 and his work has been shown in galleries and museums throughout the South including The Ogden Museum of Southern Art. In 2019 he was awarded the Fine Art Photographer of the Year by the International Photography Awards and his series, The Lost Prophets, won first place in the digital collage category. He was also selected as a finalist in the LensCulture Visual Storytelling Awards. In 2018 he won the Louisiana Contemporary Best in Show and Helis Foundation Art Prize. He has taught continuing education since 1996.

"These portrait collages are created from 3 centuries of photography and reference European court paintings as well as early American folk art portraits. The cryptic stories they present, set in the mid 19th century American South, are unriddled by their symbolism, giving insight into themes of survival, nature, spirituality, celebration, and death.

My interests lie in the beautifully flawed processes and the haunting characters found in the daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes and carte de visites of early photography. I’m fascinated by the rigid poses, the formal attire, and the anxious expressions distrusting of the new and mysterious camera."

(Text by David Knox)