Photographers
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Bruce Davidson 브루스 데이비슨 (1933 -) U.S
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Bruce Davidson
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Bruce Davidson was one of two sons raised by a single mother who, during World War II, worked in a factory to support her two sons, and who raised her boys to become self-sufficient yet sensitized to the plight of others less fortunate than themselves. As a youth, Davidson discovered photography and was given the freedom to explore the streets of the city alone with his camera. At 16, he won first prize in the Kodak National High School Competition.
Davidson went on to attend the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University. His undergraduate thesis, which pictured the emotions of football players behind the scenes of the game, was published in "Life" magazine in October 1955.
When he was drafted into the army and stationed in Paris, Davidson met Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the four founders of Magnum Photos. In 1957, having finished his military service, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for "Life", and in 1959 he became a member of Magnum.
Davidson continued to photograph extensively from 1958 to 1961, creating such bodies of work as The Widow of Montmartre, The Dwarf, Brooklyn Gang, and the Freedom Rides.
He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 to document the Civil Rights Movement across the United States. Davidson photographed Malcolm X in Harlem, steel workers in Chicago, Ku Klux Klan cross burnings, migrant farm camps in South Carolina, cotton pickers in Georgia, and the protest marches and demonstrations in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. In 1963, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his work in a one-man show that included, among others, these powerful and historic images.
Davidson received the first photography grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1966, and spent the next two years photographing one block in New York City – East 100th Street – for which he photographed the inhabitants of a rundown tenement block in Spanish Harlem on an 'eye to eye' level, is now considered a modern classic. Images from this project published in 1970 in a book of the same name.
Davidson extended his view of the city with Subway, which explored the underground New York metro and its subterranean travelers. Completed almost a decade later, Central Park was a four-year encounter with the city’s magnificent green space, a convergence of humanity, nature and the city that grew into an epic homage.
Also pursuing an interest in film, Mr. Davidson’s film Living off the Land was shown on CBS and received the Critics Award from the American Film Festival.
Of Davidson, Henry Geldzahler, the former Curator of Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, has said, “The ability to enter so sympathetically into what seems superficially an alien environment remains Bruce Davidson's sustained triumph; in his investigation he becomes the friendly recorder of tenderness and tragedy.”
Davidson continues to live and work in New York City.
Education
Yale University
Rochester Institute of Technology
Awards
1998 Open Society Institute Individual Fellowship
1969 Critics Award, the American Film Festival (for Living off the Land)
1967 The first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts
1966 National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Photography
1962 Guggenheim Fellowship
1949 First prize in the Kodak National High School Competition
USA. Palisades, New Jersey. 1958. The Dwarf.
USA. New York City. Coney Island. 1959. Brooklyn Gang.
USA. New York City. 1966. East 100th Street.
USA. New York City. 1966. East 100th Street.
USA. New York City. 1980. Subway.
USA. New York City. 1980. Subway
USA. California. Los Angeles. 1998. Actor Brad PITT.
2000 USA. Paul NEWMAN. USA. Connecticut. 2000. Paul NEWMAN.
USA. New York City. 2002. American actor Al Pacino seated in the drawing room at the National Arts Club.
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