Bruce Davidson (photographer)

His photograph from the Brooklyn Gang series of a couple preening in front of a mirrored cigarette machine at Coney Island is on the cover of Reading Magnum: A visual archive of the modern world, in which Steven Hoelscher rates the image as 'iconic'. On a formal level, Richard D. Zakia notes Davidson's aesthetic use of 'found' symbolism in his environmental portraits, referring in particular to the cover image of his book East 100th Street.

In contrast, Ian Jeffrey, in comparing Davidson with his contemporary (and friend) Diane Arbus, disputes any evident anthropological purpose for East 100th Street, instead seeing its subjects as survivors inhabiting “a darkness articulated by architectural details” and his portraits relying, like Arbus's, on "atmosphere rather than an analysis". Though they live in an oppressive environment, he writes, they "demand to be taken seriously", while Arbus represents "figments of her imagination"; her subjects "actors in a social drama."

However, also regarding East 100th Street, Douglas Harper goes as far as to accuse Davidson of "prettying up racial poverty"; while critic A. D. Coleman decries the absence of minority photographers to document it themselves. This is an issue elaborated by Erina Duganne's analyses of Davidson's, Roy DeCarava's and the Kamoinge Workshop's "Harlem" imagery, showing how poverty may be identified with ethnicity, and how photographers' cultural identity is revealed through their photographs. Coleman points to the pains taken by Davidson to avoid accusations of exploiting a repressed subculture, though stresses that he does so because of the charged politics of a white man, neither black nor Puerto Rican, "not only an outsider but an alien", photographing in the ghetto. If "Davidson has transmuted a truth which is not beautiful into an art", making a striking composition of a rat on a garbage dump, writes Coleman, the garbage may "continue to stink and decompose, and may even endure longer than Davidson's superb prints." In interview with Charlotte Cotton, Davidson answers the criticism;

An image from his Brooklyn Gang series was used as the cover for Bob Dylan's 2009 album Together Through Life.

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.

Over a decade later, in the early 1990s, Davidson completed a four-year exploration of Central Park in homage to New York City.

Davidson directed short films; the documentaries Living off the Land (1986) 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 dramatisation 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 followed this with Subway, a portrayal of passengers of the New York City Subway system, 1980–82 using color.

Howard S. Becker in 1974 was among the first contemporary sociologists to argue for a 'visual sociology' and connected it to the traditions of documentary photography, suggesting that sociology could draw upon documentary photography, identifying the earliest and most important as Robert Frank's essay on US culture, followed by Bruce Davidson's 1970 study of Harlem.

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 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.

In a 1966 Museum of Modern Art press release, John Szarkowski, then Director of the Museum's Department of Photography, wrote;

Gary Sampson of the Cleveland Institute of Art lists Davidson alongside Danny Lyon and Diane Arbus as photographers who reacted to Robert Frank’s European perspective in The Americans with a ‘hip’ ‘insider’ investigation of U.S. subcultures pervaded by a sombre angst. He points to Nathan Lyons' characterisation of this trend as ‘social landscape’ in Lyon's curation of the 1966 George Eastman House Toward a Social Landscape. The term "social landscape" was coined in 1963 by Lee Friedlander to describe his photographs, and was subsequently attached to the work of Davidson, Lyon, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Duane Michals; a hybrid term, it refers to a fusion of traditional documentary and landscape photography in which subject and environment are inseparable, and which calls attention to apparently inconsequential events and details so that object and setting modify each other to generate metaphor.

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.

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 in the South 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 were shown in the 1965 Smithsonian Institution exhibition project Profile of Poverty, produced by the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) 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 humanise the poor and demonstrate the urgency 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; and 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.

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.

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.

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. Their leader was also the subject of extensive interviews by Davidson's wife-to-be Emily Haas (they married in 1967), later published with his photographs.

The longevity of Bruce Davidson's practice, and its impact, is demonstrated in his having work featured in, or being the subject of, fourteen exhibitions over fifty years at a single major institution, the Museum of Modern Art in New York: Photographs from the Museum Collection, November 26, 1958 – January 18, 1959; Photographs for Collectors, October 1–16, 1960; Recent Acquisitions, December 21, 1960 – February 5, 1961; Art in a Changing World: 1884–1964: Edward Steichen Photography Center, May 27, 1964; The Photo Essay, March 16 – May 16, 1965; Bruce Davidson July 7 – October 2, 1966; Steichen Gallery Reinstallation, October 25, 1967; Portrait Photographs, July 9 – September 28, 1969; East 100th Street: Photographs by Bruce Davidson, September 22 – November 29, 1970; Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960, July 26 – October 2, 1978; Edward Steichen Photography Center Reinstallation, December 21, 1979; Reinstallation of the Collection, October 23, 1980 – January 3, 1982; New York at Night: Photographs from the Collection, December 12, 2006 – March 5, 2007; Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen, September 15, 2010 – May 2, 2011.

After his military service, in 1957, Davidson worked briefly as a freelance photographer.

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.

Bruce Landon Davidson (born September 5, 1933) is an American photographer. He has been a member of the Magnum Photos agency since 1958. His photographs, notably those taken in Harlem, New York City, have been widely exhibited and published. He is known for photographing communities usually hostile to outsiders.

Davidson was born on September 5, 1933, in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, 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 colour. His artistic influences included Robert Frank, Eugene Smith, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.