Although Life had already published Bruce Davidson’s work, his position in the world of photography was really cemented with the publication of four of his photographs in the June 1960 issue of Esquire under the title ”Brooklyn Minority Report”, accompanied by an essay by the novelist Norman Mailer. Through this work, Davidson revealed his early interest in the photo essay as well as his use of photography to intimately study a group of people from the ”inside”. Both themes have continued to preoccupy him throughout his photographic career.
Motivated both by his disillusionment with photojournalism and his desire to move beyond Robert Frank’s seminal book The Americans, Davidson turned to a group of ”troubled” youth in Brooklyn in the summer of 1959 to make a new photographic statement. With the help of a social worker, he contacted a gang of teenagers who called themselves ‘The Jokers’ and whose ‘rumbles’ were frequently in the headlines. For 11 months, the gang members agreed to let Davidson photograph their daily lives, and the resulting images provide both an intimate portrait of the teenagers and a probing examination of the restlessness and alienation of youth culture in 1950s America. Davidson explains: “What I was photographing was not the gang, but a sense of isolation and tension within the teenagers…. I never felt a separation between myself and what I was photographing, because I was really there with the feeling. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel guilty because I could go home to a motel and they were sleeping on the floor. I just never felt separated. With the gang I was in the same mood as they were.”
Born in 1933 in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, to a Jewish family of Polish origin, Davidson developed an early interest in photography, owning a Brownie camera and setting up a rudimentary darkroom by the age of ten. He continued to dabble in photography throughout high school, working weekends and summers as a stock boy in a camera shop and later as an apprentice to a commercial photographer. In 1951 Davidson entered the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he studied with Ralph Hattersley. In 1955, he decided to pursue graduate studies at Yale University, where he studied philosophy, painting, and photography with graphic designer Herbert Matter, photographer and designer Alexey Brodovitch, and painter Josef Albers. A class project at Yale led to his first publication in Life, ”Tension in the Dressing Room,” which Davidson photographed at a Yale football game and submitted to Life’s editors. The photo essay appeared in the 31 October 1955 issue.
After a semester at Yale, the US Army sent Davidson to Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe, just outside Paris. Working as an Army photographer gave Davidson the opportunity to spend many weekends in Paris, and he soon befriended the widow of impressionist painter Leon Fauché, a contemporary of Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. For this project, Davidson spent weekend after weekend photographing Madame Fauché as she walked to market or sat in her garret surrounded by her husband’s paintings. The images became the subject of his second photographic essay, ‘The Widow of Montmartre’, published in Esquire in 1958. In Paris, Davidson also met Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose work he had been introduced to at Rochester and who was to become not only his mentor but also a personal friend.
In 1957, Davidson was discharged from the army and returned to New York to work as a freelance photographer for Life magazine. In 1958 Magnum Photos offered him an associate membership, and a year later he became a full member. He liked the open atmosphere of Magnum much better than the magazine industry, and in 1961 he accepted an assignment through Magnum from The New York Times to cover the Freedom Riders in the South. As a result of this assignment, Davidson began a documentary project on the civil rights movement, and in 1962 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support his work. John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art included photographs from the project in a solo exhibition in 1966, and they were also included in The Negro American (1966), a collection of essays on the situation of African Americans in the United States.
Davidson’s interest in the position of African Americans continued with his project East 100th Street, a photographic work that explored a block of Spanish Harlem. He began the two-year project in 1966 using a large-format 4×5 inch view camera mounted on a tripod, rather than a hand-held camera, to avoid being perceived as an ‘intruder’ taking pictures without interacting with his subjects. He made over 1,000 negatives for the project and in March 1968 the magazine Du published a portfolio with a text by Davidson. On 15 August 1969, Life published a four-page spread on the project. Davidson chose the block largely because of its reputation as one of the worst blocks in the city, and has been the subject of much controversy since its inception. Critics such as A. D. Coleman accused Davidson of exploiting a downtrodden subculture, while supporters such as Hilton Kramer praised him for elevating his subject matter to the status of high art. In 1970, the Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition of 43 photographs from the project.
Having photographed ‘interior space’ in his 1980 East 100th Street project, Davidson began to document ‘subterranean space’ with his colour photographs of the New York subway, and between 1991 and 1995 he worked on a project of ‘open space’ with his panoramic photographs of New York’s Central Park. Although most of Davidson’s work centres on human isolation, Portraits, published in 1999, focuses on a wide range of celebrities, many of whom Davidson has photographed on assignment for magazines and newspapers.
Photography, however, was not the only medium that attracted Davidson. From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, Davidson turned to filmmaking, making the documentaries Living off the Land (1969) and Zoo Doctor (1971), as well as a feature film, Nightmare and Mrs. Pupko’s Beard (1972), based on short stories by Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer.
