Bruce Davidson Boeken

“Go back into the subway and look beyond the graffiti. Lift up your heads and look around, see what Bruce has revealed – the beauty in the subway population, the enormous amount of colour below and above ground, the varieties and pleasures to be seen from the subway. The shrill insistence of the noise in our ears and of the graffiti to our eyes does not end the catalogue of effects the subway has on our senses. Bruce Davidson has reopened and rewritten that catalogue with this magnificent series of photographs. Light, colour, humanity, affection, and hope can be added to our impressions of the New York subway system.” In 1980, Bruce Davidson began capturing the New York subway, immersing himself in this vibrant yet sometimes perilous environment. Initially working in black and white, he soon recognized the necessity of color to convey the vividness of this graffiti-laden world. This updated edition features new scans of Davidson’s Kodachrome slides and includes additional images. Born in 1933, Davidson started photographing at age ten and later studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University before serving in the army. After his military service, he freelanced for LIFE and joined Magnum in 1958. His accolades include a Guggenheim fellowship and the first National Endowment for the Arts in Photography. Steidl has also published his works, including England / Scotland 1960, Circus, and Outside Inside.

This volume presents Bruce Davidson’s personal selections from his lesser-known color archive. Ranging from a period of fifty-six years and counting, these images are representative of the photographer’s color career. Assignments from various magazines (Vogue, National Geographic, Life magazine) and commercial projects led him to photograph fashion (early 1960s), the Shah of Iran with his family (1964), keepers of French monuments (1988), the supermodel Kylie Bax (1997), and college cheerleaders (1989). He photographed in India and China, but also at home in New York, in Chicago, and along the Pacific Coast Highway. In 1968, Michelangelo Antonioni invited him to document the making of his film Zabriskie Point. Davidson also continued to pursue personal projects, e. g. photographing the Yiddish writer and Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (1972–75), the New York City subway (1980), and Katz’s Delicatessen (2004). Often staying on in a country after an official assignment, he documented Welsh coalfields, family holidays in Martha’s Vineyard, and travelled through Patagonia and Mexico.

Highlighting Bruce Davidson's overlooked works from 1955 to 1993, this collection features 130 images that reveal his professional and personal evolution. The book is the culmination of a year-long project to sift through decades of contact sheets, showcasing Davidson's versatility through early assignments, intimate family moments, and unpublished color photographs from significant projects like East 100th Street and Campers. It offers a fresh perspective on his artistic journey and the depth of his photographic narrative.

„Esquire’s editors sent me to Los Angeles, and when I landed at L. A. International Airport I noticed giant palm trees growing in the parking lot. I ordered a hamburger through a microphone speaker in a drive-in called Tiny Naylor’s. The freeways were blank and brilliant, chromium-plated bumpers reflected the Pacific Ocean, but the air quality was said to be bad. People looking like mannequins seemed at peace on the Sunset Strip while others were euphoric as they watered the desert. I stood there ready with my Leica, aware of my shadow on the pavement. I walked up to strangers, framed, focused, and in a split second of alienations and cynicism, pressed the shutter button. Suddenly I had an awakening that led me to another level of visual understanding. But in the end, for some unknown reasons, the editors rejected the pictures, and I had to return home with a big box of prints, put them in a drawer, and forgot all about the trip.“ Bruce Davidson

Black & White is the definitive collection of Bruce Davidson’s black and white photography, spanning a period of 40 years. This collectable five-volume set comprises re-prints of classic books of Davidson’s poignant and purposeful imagery, some of them newly edited and expanded. The seminal bodies of work are Circus (1958), an intimate portrait of a dwarf clown; Brooklyn Gang (1959), depicting a group of troubled youths; Time of Change (1961–1965), a civil rights documentation in America; East 100th Street (1966–1968), showing life on one block in Spanish Harlem; and Central Park (1992– 1995), exploring layers of life in New York’s famous urban oasis. Black & White is a tribute to Davidson’s unique photographic achievement, and a powerful document of social change.

A collection of black & white photographs showing life in the US during the decade of the 1950's.