Bruce Davidson: Inside/Outside
Photographs from the artist’s personal archive
Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
September 25 – November 1, 2003
The Howard Greenberg Gallery celebrates the opening of the new gallery space with an exhibition of vintage photographs from the personal archive of BRUCE DAVIDSON, the highly respected and award-winning photographer. A selection of works from the early years of Bruce Davidson’s career, most of which have never before been exhibited, are the first photographs to hang on the walls of the Fuller building gallery, designed by Lubrano Ciavarra Design, LLC.
Bruce Davidson is widely acknowledged as one of the most important photographers in his field. His work has had a major influence on a generation of photographers, critics, and viewers. Bruce Davidson’s talent was recognized early on by a broad range of institutions at the forefront of journalism, photography, and artistic trends. At the age of twenty-four, Bruce Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for LIFE magazine. A year later, in 1958, he was invited to join Magnum Photos, the pre-eminent photo-agency owned by its photographer members. Shortly thereafter, in 1963, he had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
Bruce Davidson has been described as an outsider who gets inside his subjects’ lives. He establishes a rich and meaningful visual vocabulary that brings the dignity and diversity of people to the awareness of others. The photographs in this exhibition are taken from bodies of work from the 1950s and 1960s that have been reproduced in many prestigious publications. These include The Widow of Montmartre (1956), an intimate portrayal of the widow of a French Impressionist painter; The Dwarf (1958), haunting images of a circus clown’s loneliness; Brooklyn Gang (1959), an emotionally charged series of a teenage street gang which later was published in Esquire magazine. Brruce Davidson was the first photographer to be awarded the National Endowment for the Arts in 1967. This enabled him to continue his documentation of one block in East Harlem. East 100th Street, published by Harvard University Press in 1970 and re-published by St. Ann’s Press earlier this year, is now considered a modern classic. The later publication includes 37 additional and previously unseen images. In addition, images from Time of Change (2002), Civil Rights photographs from 1961 to 1965, are featured in the exhibition.
Bruce Davidson continues to lecture, conduct workshops and undertake professional commissions throughout the world. He has had one-man exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, and the Palais de Tokyo in France. He has received numerous accolades including two awards from the National Endowment of the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Eastman Kodak Reedy Award. His photographs have appeared in numerous publications and his prints have been acquired by many major museums and private collectors worldwide, including Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, Topan’s “Masters of Photography” in Japan, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum Ludwig Cologne, the George Eastman House, Rochester. He has also directed three films.
John Szarkowski, former Director of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art who gave Davidson two solo exhibitions, says of Bruce Davidson’s work: “ Few contemporary photographers give us their observations so unembellished, so free of apparent craft or artifice. The presence that fills these pictures seems the presence of the life that is described, scarcely changed by its transmutation into art.”
HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY
The Fuller Building, 41 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022
