Bruce Davidson

(1933- )

Bruce Davidson; OUTSIDE INSIDE

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Bruce Davidson was born on September 5, 1933 in Oak Park to a Jewish family of Polish origins. When he was 10, his mother built him a darkroom in their basement and he began taking photographs. When he was fifteen his mother remarried to a lieutenant commander in the navy who was given a Kodak rangefinder camera, which Davidson was allowed to use before being given a more advanced camera for his bar mitzvah. He was employed at Austin Camera as a stock boy and was approached by local news photographer Al Cox, who taught him the technical nuances of photography, in addition to lighting and printing skills, including dye transfer color. His artistic influences included Robert Frank, Eugene Smith, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

At 19, Davidson won his first national recognition for his photography, the 1952 Kodak National High School Photographic Award, for a picture of an owl. From 1951, Davidson attended the Rochester Institute of Technology where he used a second-hand Contax to photograph at Lighthouse Mission as he studied under Ralph Hattersley, and in 1955, continued in graduate studies at Yale University, studying philosophy, painting, and photography under graphic designer Herbert Matter, photographer and designer Alexey Brodovitch, and 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 color. For his college thesis, Davidson created a photo-essay, ‘Tension in the Dressing Room,’ his first to be published in Life, documenting the emotions of Yale football players behind the scenes of the game.

After one semester at Yale, Davidson was drafted into the US Army, where he served in the Signal Corps at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, attached to the post's photo pool. Initially, he was given routine photo assignments. An editor of the post's newspaper, recognizing his talents, asked that he be permanently assigned to the newspaper. There, given a certain degree of autonomy, he was allowed to further hone his talents.

The Army posted Davidson to Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe, just outside Paris; and, in bohemian Montmartre, he photographed the widow of the impressionist painter Leon Fauché with her husband's paintings in an archetypal garret. She was old enough to have known Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Gauguin. Davidson's resulting photo-essay, ‘Widow of Montmartre,’ was published in Esquire in 1958. The series impressed Henri Cartier-Bresson, who became a personal friend and facilitated Davidson's induction into Magnum Photos.

After his military service, in 1957, Davidson worked briefly as a freelance photographer. In 1958, he became an associate member of the Magnum Photos agency and a full member a year later. During the summer of 1959, and coincidentally only two years after the premiere of West Side Story, through a social worker he made contact with homeless, troubled teenagers who called themselves the Jokers, and after photographing them over 11 months produced “Brooklyn Gang.’ The leader of the gang was also the subject of extensive interviews by Davidson's wife-to-be Emily Haas (they married in 1967), later published with his photographs.

When in 1960 Queen magazine invited him to Britain for two months, he documented the idiosyncratic stoicism of the natives of the islands from an American perspective.

Through the agency in 1961 he received his first assignment to photograph high fashion for Vogue, and was assigned by The New York Times to cover the Freedom Riders in the South. The Freedom Riders assignment led Davidson to undertake a documentary project on the civil rights movement. From 1961 to 1965, he chronicled its events and effects around the country. A number of his prints were shown in the 1965 Smithsonian Institution exhibition project ‘Profile of Poverty,’ produced by the Office of Economic Opportunity in support of the antipoverty programs of the 1960s. President Johnson assembled the ‘White House Photography Program,' headed by MoMA's John Szarkowski, through which Davidson's project was used to humanize the poor and demonstrate the urgency needed of government action. In support of the project, Davidson received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961, and the project was displayed in 1963 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Curator John Szarkowski included pictures from the project in a 1966 solo exhibition, and they were also included in ‘The Negro American,’ a 1966 collection of essays on the status of African-Americans. Upon the completion of his documentation of the civil rights movement, Davidson received the first ever photography grant from the National Endowment for the Arts of $12,000.

In 1964 Davidson became an instructor at the School of Visual Arts, New York (thereafter giving private workshops in his own studio/darkroom), and continued to produce features for Vogue: Philip Johnson in his glass house, Andy Warhol in his loft, Cristina Ford in her backyard, and offered a photography workshop from his Greenwich Village studio. He produced a story on a “topless” restaurant in San Francisco for Esquire (1965), then later in the year traveled to Wales for a Holiday magazine assignment to photograph castles and also covered the coal mining industry in South Wales. On his honeymoon in 1967, Davidson photographed the James Duffy and Sons Circus in Ireland, for the series ‘Circus.’

Davidson's next project, published in 1970 as ‘East 100th Street,’ a two-year documentation of a conspicuously poverty-stricken block in East Harlem, is a widely referenced work. Its series of environmental portraits was shot on large format film with a view camera. Vicki Goldberg and Milton Kramer identify it as the first work of photojournalism to be presented as an art book. The project was also displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970 and subjects of the two-year Harlem project were invited to the opening of the show after Davidson had already presented two thousand prints to people on the block.

Davidson followed this with ‘Subway,’ a portrayal of passengers of the New York City Subway system in color, during 1980-82. Over a decade later, in the early 1990s, Davidson completed a four-year exploration of Central Park in homage to New York City. In 1998, Davidson returned to East 100th Street to document the revitalization, renewal, and changes that occurred in the 30 years since he last documented it. For this visit, he presented a community slide show and received an Open Society Institute Individual Fellowship Award.

Davidson took stills for Michelangelo Antonioni's ‘Zabriskie Point,’ as he also did on ‘The Misfits,’ amongst Inge Morath, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dennis Stock, Eve Arnold, Ernst Haas, Cornell Capa, Elliott Erwitt, and Erich Hartmann. But he also produced motion pictures himself. In 1968 he purchased a 16mm movie camera to film on East 100th Street. Davidson directed short films: the documentaries ‘Living off the Land’ (1986); one on conservation in the United Kingdom made with a grant from the American Film Institute and awarded the Critics Choice Award; and ‘Zoo Doctor’ (1971) for children. With another grant from the American Film Institute he produced a 28-minute dramatization of Isaac Singer’s ‘Nightmare and Mrs. Pupko’s Beard’ (1972), which appeared on Public Television and won first prize in its class in the 1972 American Film Festival.

Davidson continues to work as an editorial photographer, and has contributed to the Center for Photography at Woodstock workshops and lectures. An image from his Brooklyn Gang series was used as the cover for Bob Dylan's 2009 album ‘Together Through Life.’

Excerpts

“Through fifty years in photography, I have entered worlds in transition, seen people isolated, abused, abandoned, and invisible. I work out of a frame of mind that is constantly changing, challenging perceptions and prejudices. I view my work as a series. I often find myself an outsider on the inside discovering beauty and meaning in the most desperate situations.”

OUTSIDE INSIDE 1954-1961: A Journey of Consciousness, p. 9

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“In photography, we do our reading and writing at the same time.” Ernst Haas