Bruce
Davidson
,american, b. 1933
Bruce
Davidson began taking photographs at the age of ten in Oak Park,
Illinois. While attending Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale
University, he continued to further his knowledge and develop his
passion. He was later drafted into the army and stationed near Paris.
There he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the founders of the
renowned cooperative photography agency, Magnum Photos.
When
he left military service in 1957, Davidson worked as a freelance
photographer for LIFE magazine and in 1958 became a full member of
Magnum. From 1958 to 1961 he created such seminal bodies of work as
“The Dwarf,” Brooklyn Gang,” and “Freedom Rides.” He
received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1962 and created a profound
documentation of the civil rights movement in America. In 1963, the
Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his early work in a solo
show.
In
1967, he received the first grant for photography from the National
Endowment for the Arts, having spent two years witnessing the dire
social conditions on one block in East Harlem. This work was
published by Harvard University Press in 1970 under the title East
100th Street and was later republished and expanded by St. Ann’s
Press. The work became an exhibition that same year at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. In 1980, he captured the vitality of the New
York Metro’s underworld that was later published in a book, Subway,
and exhibited at the International Center for Photography in 1982.
From 1991-95 he photographed the landscape and layers of life in
Central Park. In 2006, he completed a series of photographs titled
“The Nature of Paris,” many of which have been shown and acquired
by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Davidson
received an Open Society Institute Individual Fellowship in 1998 to
return to East 100th Street His awards include the Lucie Award for
Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Photography in 2004 and a Gold
Medal Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Arts Club in 2007.
Classic bodies of work from his 50-year career have been extensively
published in monographs and are included in many major public and
private fine art collections around the world. He continues to
photograph and produce new bodies of work
