WHITE MAGIC

duckrabbit first met David White in the lobby of a hotel on the banks of the Nile in Egypt. I thought he was alright but when I saw his photos it was love at first sight. A few years previously I stumbled across a Sebastiao Salgado exhibition in Liverpool. I had no idea who the guy was but his photos changed my life. It wasn’t that they were so heart bleedingly great, it was that they smacked my conscience around the gallery, followed me home and waged war on my dreams. I was twenty three and it was the first photographic exhibition I’d ever seen. Almost everything else was a disappointment after that, even a subsequent Salgado exhibition I saw in Walsall. Then I met David in Egypt. A straight talking guy with a refreshing lack of pretentiousness who lives to shoot and shoots from the heart. Rare amongst photojournalists he doesn’t seem to be trying to save anyone, or himself, and he’s not preoccupied by misery, in-fact his images often reveal mystery and hope. Some of them are just damn funny.

This is selection of some of my favorite White images. There’s a lot of great stories behind them so if you ever meet David, say for example hanging out in the lobby of an Egyptian hotel, buy him a beer and settle yourself in for the night …

You can see a fullscreen version of this slideshow here, and you can see more of David’s work on his website.