John M. Davis
John M. Davis is an award-winning advertising creative director who is also an avid photographer, artist and traveler. He has visited over 60 countries and lived abroad in four countries in Europe and Africa. With a background as an award-winning advertising creative director, John approaches each trip as its own creative assignment as well.
He documents obscure corners of the globe with his photography, journals and art–drawn to areas of the planet that are extremely difficult to access or off-limits to most travelers. Taking the time to absorb the culture of each place he visits, John immerses himself in each place, often staying for weeks or months and studying the local culture and language.
He has utilized both medium format film and digital cameras in addition to creating pen, ink drawings and watercolor paintings of the people and places he visits. He will often merge various media in a collage, incorporating typography, portraits and abstract elements from the local surroundings. His collection of travel journals from around the globe is filled with writings, drawings and scrapbook collages.
Highlights
In 1999, John spent two months traveling through Indonesia to eight different islands in order to document the various tribes on areas as remote as Siberut Island, off the coast of Sumatra, all the way to the mountain highland tribes of West Papua, New Guinea. It was here that he documented a political uprising of 30,000 highland tribe members in the capital city of Manokwari.
In 2004, he was invited to Afghanistan by the United Nations, just after the U.S. invasion, to document project sites throughout the country. John traveled with a U.N. convoy to areas around Kabul and to the north, including the famous Bamiyan Valley, home to the large Buddha statues carved into the cliffs, which were subsequently destroyed by the Taliban.
John lived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for seven months in 2014. He studied Amharic, and traveled extensively throughout the country–observing and documenting the diversity of the country and its different tribal groups.
In 2015, John moved to Sudan and set up an art studio in his home in Khartoum. He traveled the country and documented his impressions by pen, ink and watercolor. Since photography is illegal in Sudan, he would ‘sneak’ photographs–often covering up his camera with a bag in order to get reference material for his artwork.
In 2015 and 2016, within a twelve month period, John completed what he calls a ‘religious trifecta’. During that time, he lived in Ethiopia (a highly conservative Orthodox Christian country), spent a month in the isolated country of Bhutan, (the most traditional Buddhist country in the world) and finally moved to Sudan (the North African country under Islamic Sharia law).
Other adventures include trekking 76 kilometers alone across the Oso Peninsula of Costa Rica, river rafting seven days through Alaska, north of the arctic circle, without a guide, ice climbing in Patagonia, road tripping throughout Namibia, visiting Gabon during national elections, and 4x4’ing south through Venezuela into the jungles of the Amazonian (twice) visiting tribes near the Brazilian border.
John is also supports several NGO’s primarily focused on environmental and social issues in Africa, including Shine On Sierra Leone, The Valentino Achak Deng Foundation promoting eduction for girls in South Sudan, and the OELO, Organisation Ecotouristique du Lac Oguemoué in Gabon. He is an advisor and media director of Greenworld.org - focused on community tree planting in Kenya, which has planted over 10 million trees.