A is for Ant
Director: Jack Davison
United Kingdom, 2024, 11 min
Shooting Format:16mm and 35mm using Kodak 200T
Festival Year:2025
Category:Experimental
Crew:Cinematographer - James Beattie. Set Design & Costume Design - Shona Heath.
Email:jackdavisonphoto@gmail.com
Synopsis
‘A is for Ant’ is an immersive film by British photographer Jack Davison that explores the alphabet through a captivating blend of real action and animation.
About the director
British photographer Jack Davison's oeuvre effortlessly embraces digital, analogue, black and white and colour photography. His works depict the human figure, architecture, animals, objects, landscapes and townscapes; yet his subject is always photography itself.
Uncovering the surreal and the sensual in everyday life, Davison's use of chiaroscuro, framing and exposure as instruments of abstraction draws on the history of photography - extending through figures like Saul Leiter, Shoji Udea and August Sander. Meanwhile, Davison's works draw aesthetic parallel with artists such as Max Ernst and Man Ray which key him to a Surrealist inheritance. Davison's playful and curious approach is shaped by the equally formative space of online platforms like Flickr and Tumblr, where he first developed his craft as a young man taking pictures in the Essex countryside.
In 2024, Davison directed and debuted his first moving image work A is For Ant, - a living alphabet- made in collaboration with award-winning production designer Shona Heath.
Jack Davison (b. 1990 Essex, UK. Lives and works in London, UK) had his debut UK solo exhibition at Cob Gallery and a further solo exhibition at Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam. He has presented work in group exhibitions at Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, in 2021. Davison presented his first solo art fair booth at Paris Photo in 2025 with Cob Gallery. His portrait photography is included in the permanent collection of The National Portrait Gallery, London.
Filmmaker's note
“I was always drawn towards alphabet books as a child, and I often spent car journey’s listing various creatures in alphabetical order much to the delight of my parents.
I remember seeing the Dali museum in Figueres for the first time. That level of surreal bizarre artifice really shook my adolescent brain - there was something triumphant in it’s surreality and I remember being both thrilled and mildly terrified.
Since I’ve become a parent, I have always wanted to work on a project that spoke to them. A piece of work that they could respond to and have as a window into my world, one that celebrated aspects of life that are important to me. Creativity, play, the natural world, beauty and silliness, A is for Ant is an attempt to celebrate these concepts.”
Jack Davison