Bruce Gidden, Higher Pictures, New York

Bruce Gidden 
Higher Pictures, New York 
December 12, 2013 - January 18, 2014

Higher Pictures, NYC, presents new photographs by Bruce Gilden from his latest book, A Complete Examination of Middlesex, a commission he realized in London in 2011-2013. Gilden is known for his confrontational and unique approach of street photography, and his powerful images have been dividing opinions since the beginning of his career. For the first time the artist requested permission from his subjects to take a close-up portrait of their faces on the streets of London. In Gilden’s own words:

What I’m searching for when I walk the street are people I can engage with: somebody whose face, and particularly eyes, scream a story.

For this exhibition Bruce Gilden made three larger than life portraits, each is a silver gelatin print, 66 x 48 inches.

In 2013, Bruce Gilden was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, and has published Foreclosures, and A Complete Examination of Middlesex. Some of his previous publications include Facing New York (1992), Haiti (1999), Go (2000), Coney Island (2002) and A Beautiful Catastrophe (2005).

Born in 1946 in Brooklyn, New York, BRUCE GIDDEN studied sociology at Penn State University. He bought his first camera in 1968, and started his first two major essays photographing Mardi Gras in New Orleans and the beach in Coney Island. From photographing the street of New York City and of the major cities in the world, Bruce Gilden has worked on personal essays in England, Haiti, Ireland, India, Japan, Russia and Australia. Over the past four years, Bruce Gilden has directed his lens on America realizing a documentation of foreclosures, and participating to three segments of the collective project Postcards in America where he has been photographing in color.   

Bruce Gilden has received three National Endowments for the Arts fellowships (1980, 1984 and 1992), a Villa Medicis Hors les Murs (1995), New York State Foundation for the Arts Grant (1979, 1992 and 2000), the European Award for Photography (1996) and a Japan Foundation Fellowship (1999). His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada, The Royal Photographic Society, Bath, England, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland, The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, Japan. Gilden joined Magnum Photos in 1998. He lives in New York City. 

Previous exhibition: Herbert Matter 

HIGHER PICTURES
980 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075
Gallery website: www.higherpictures.com