Bruce Davidson (photographer)
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Bruce Davidson (born September 5, 1933 is an American photographer. He has been a member of Magnum since 1958. His photographs, notably those taken in Harlem, have been widely exhibited and published in a number of books.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Childhood and young adulthood
Bruce Davidson was born in Oak Park, Illinois to a single mother who worked in a factory to support her two sons. Davidson’s mother raised her children to be autonomous, while being sensitive and aware of the troubles of the less fortunate. At ten, Bruce Davidson began taking pictures, as he was given the freedom to wander the streets of Oak Park alone. Soon after, he approached a local photographer who taught him technical nuances of photography, in addition to lighting and printing skills. In his mid-teens, Davidson began to ride Chicago’s elevated train system into the city, exploring neighborhoods and the Chicago Loop, observing wide varieties of people, and most importantly, developing skills and interests that would manifest themselves in his later photographic works.
[edit] Training
At sixteen, Davidson won his first major photography award, the Kodak National High School snapshot contest, with a picture of an owl at a nature preserve. Following high school, Davidson attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University, where one of his teachers was artist Josef Albers. Davidson showed Albers a box of prints of alcoholics on Skid Row; Albers told him to throw out his "sentimental" work and join his class in drawing and colour. For his college thesis, he created a photo essay that was published in Life in 1955, documenting the emotions of football players behind the scenes of the game.
[edit] The army and France
Following college, Davidson was drafted into the army and stationed in Paris. Here he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, a later colleague with Magnum Photos, sharing his portfolio and receiving advice from an accomplished photographer. While in France, Davidson produced a photo essay on the Widow of Montmartre, an old Parisian woman.
[edit] Major works and joining Magnum Photos
After his military service, in 1957, Davidson worked briefly as a freelance photographer before joining Magnum Photos the following year. During the following few years, he photographed extensively, most notably producing Brooklyn Gang and The Dwarf. From 1961 to 1965, Bruce Davidson produced one of his most famous bodies of work as he chronicled the events and effects of Civil Rights Movement around the country, in both the North and the South. In support of his project, Davidson received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 and his finished project was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. To add to his growing accomplishments, upon the completion of his documentation of the Civil Rights Movement, Bruce Davidson received the first ever photography grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
[edit] Exploration of New York City
Bruce Davidson’s next project, East 100th Street, is perhaps his most famous. Considered a modern classic, East 100th Street was a two-year documentation of an infamous block in East Harlem. This project was also displayed at the Museum of Modern Art. Davidson followed with Subway, a classic portrayal of the New York subway system in the late 1970s. Using color to convey mood, Davidson documented a gritty and lively urban underworld. Over a decade later, in the early 1990s, Bruce Davidson completed a four-year exploration of Central Park as a beautiful and grand homage to New York City.
[edit] Recent activities
In 1998, Davidson returned to East 100th Street to document the revitalization, renewal, and changes that occurred in the thirty years since he last documented it. For this visit he presented a community slide show and received and Open Society Institute Individual Fellowship Award. In addition to his most well known publications, many of Bruce Davidson’s lesser known works have appeared around the world and in many prestigious museums. Recently, a book has appeared of Davidson’s portraits of people such as John Cage, Marilyn Monroe, Leonard Bernstein, Kiki Smith, Fannie Lou Hamer, Andy Warhol, and Jack Kerouac. To this day, Davidson continues to work as an editorial photographer. His photographs appear around the world and in many prestigious museums. Also, Davidson has directed two award winning short films, one a documentary called Living off the Land and a more surreal tale titled Isaac Singer’s Nightmare and Mrs. Pupko’s Beard. He lives in New York City with his wife.
[edit] Common themes in Davidson's photography
Bruce Davidson photographs people on an eye-to-eye level, portraying and inducing powerful emotion, while focusing his lens on people in the midst of transition and a search for meaning.
In all of Davidson’s works, instead of objectifying his subjects -- as objects of pity, subjects of curiosity, or specimens for analysis -- he humanizes them, portraying them with a sense of vigor and vitality, as we are given insight to their lives, struggles, and desires. In particular, Davidson often documents the human search for meaning among people who face potentially ruinous social obstacles and economic strife. This type of documentation is especially evident in East 100th Street, Brooklyn Gang, and Davidson’s Civil Rights Era photography.
He induces and portrays powerful emotion in all of his major works; emotions such as loneliness, despair, love, determination, and uncertainty, while his realism induces social concern and sympathy for complete strangers.
Bruce Davidson is extremely adept at documenting people or subjects in transition, whether rebellious teenagers coming of age, persecuted people fighting for equality, the urban poor amid soon-to-be demolished tenements, a gritty underworld soon to be sterilized, a traveling circus soon to be disbanded, or the passage of the seasons amid the magnificence, grandeur, and human heartache evident within Central Park.
Bruce Davidson creates an expression of the human condition by capturing his diverse subjects and settings in a personal and lyrical visual language, as he is able to transcend race, culture, and background, thereby uniting all his subjects in a shared poetic human experience. He allows us to see both beauty and pieces of ourselves in wide ranges of people. Through Davidson’s works we see how everyone shares similar experiences, how we are all united, and therefore how everyone can truly relate to one another.
[edit] Analysis of major works
[edit] Brooklyn Gang
Bruce Davidson’s 1959 project Brooklyn Gang is an intimate photographic study of a rebellious Brooklyn teenage gang, who called themselves The Jokers. Davidson was able to document their candid manifestations of worry, energy, enthusiasm, anger, and occasional sadness. The gang seemed to exist in their own secluded world, meandering from Coney Island to diners and taxicabs, anxiously moving forward with an unknown future and unknown goals. Some of them were even thoroughly troubled: one member died from a heroin overdose a few years after Davidson left them. Not only is Bruce Davidson’s work a sincere portrayal of troubled teenagers coming of age, but it also acts as a documentation of teenage life during 1950s, exposing the emotional climate of that time period and exposing the dark side of a supposedly innocent time period.
[edit] Civil Rights Movement
Davidson’s documentation of the Civil Rights Movement for several years in the early 1960s was a complete examination of the turbulent period and the epic and defiant journey of self-discovery. He chronicled the period by photographing both the North and the South, the blacks and the whites, the failure and the triumph, the love and the hate, and finally, the passion, tyranny, and bold defiance. A unique and particularly powerful section of Bruce Davidson’s Civil Rights photography is his portraiture of a 110-year-old woman, born a slave and able to live long enough to witness the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Bruce Davidson’s comprehensive Civil Rights photography captures the heart of an extraordinary movement and a tumultuous period.
[edit] East 100th Street
Davidson’s powerful and affecting late 1960s photography on East 100th Street remains a classic documentation of the American ghetto. This honest and emotional work truly ventured into the lives of resilient residents dealing with poverty, rising drug abuse, crime, decay, and abandonment. The explored all aspects of the block, photographic both interior spaces and life on the street, approaching everything with a level of dignity and respect. In this work, we are able to see Davidson’s incredible photographic eye and his ability to spot minor details that many others would not recognize, as he captures gentleness and vitality within an outwardly rundown and rough environment. His work shows the triumph of the human spirit, depicting the great obstacles that people face, as they go about their daily lives and search for their place in the grand scheme of things.
[edit] Central Park and Subway
Both Central Park and Subway act as a metaphor for a larger human experience, as the somewhat surreal images showcase extreme diversity and a theater of human behavior. The dark moody images from Subway, laden with lighting effects, showcase the grit, beauty, and strong ambiance of New York’s colorful underworld. By using an extreme wide angle lens and utilizing light and color to accentuate subjects, Davidson also takes a stylistic leap in Subway, whereas in Central Park he depicts the park as a magical and ethereal setting, a place of renewal in the middle of one of the world’s largest cities. He shows the convergence of people from completely different classes and backgrounds, from the homeless to privileged, the young and the old, to the homosexuals and the oddballs.
