Bruce Davidson and Khalik Allah @ Magnum Gallery, Paris - NEW YORK - Inaugural Exhibition

Bruce Davidson and Khalik Allah 

NEW YORK 

Magnum Gallery, Paris 

21 October - 18 December 2021 

Bruce Davidson

USA. New York City. 1980. Subway

© Bruce Davidson/ Magnum Photos

Khalik Allah

USA. Harlem, New York City. 2014 

© Khalik Allah/ Magnum Photos

The Magnum Gallery presents Bruce Davidson and Khalik Allah: NEW YORK. The exhibition inaugurates Paris’ new gallery located in the 11th district and for the first time, brings together the work of two Magnum photographers who, generations apart, explored New York City’s energy through their lenses.

Bruce Davidson and Khalik Allah offer two visions of urban life, above and underground, captured at different time periods, through two distinctive yet parallel viewpoints. The exhibition, which predominantly features Bruce Davidson’s vintage prints, explores themes of humanity, street life and perception, while highlighting the effects of transmission.

In 1980, Buce Davidson found a new source of inspiration in the New York subway. It was a challenging and dangerous location, but the photographer managed to retrieve striking and colorful images of passengers from this dark underworld. “Color in the subway was different. I found that the strobe light reflecting off the metallic surfaces of the  defaced subway cars created an iridescence I had seen in photographs of deep-sea fish thousands of fathoms below the ocean surface, glowing under electronic flash, never having been exposed to light before.” His underground expeditions eventually culminated in the publication of Subway in 1986, a seminal, epoch-defining series that served as both a captivating study of light and color as well as a historical document of an elemental part of New York.

Bruce Davidson paved the way for new generations of photographers including Khalik Allah who, more than 40 years after the publication of East 100th Street, shed light on a community in distress, riddled with poverty and addiction. Khalik Allah cites Bruce Davidson as one of his major influences and specifically focused his lens on the black community frequenting the corner of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue. Beginning in 2012, Khalik Allah would return to this corner, shooting only at night. Through the flash of his camera and vibrant colors, he sought to restore the dignity of the dehumanized inhabitants of this area of the city. The resulting pieces are vibrant depictions of humanity. In Souls Against the Concrete, published in 2017, Allah comments: “This body of work is about redemption, strength, and resilience amid addiction, poverty, and street life.”

When considered together, the work in these series are characterized by the same degree of directness and proximity with their subjects. There is neither judgment nor sentimentalism. These works do not impose any moralist vision; on the contrary, they convey honest empathy and rely on genuine immersion, placing the author on the side of his subjects. Highlights in the exhibition include both color and black and white prints including striking portraits from the late 1960s and Subway views from 1980 depicting individual statuesque poses in the streets and casual scenes featuring people inside the cars.

Bruce Davidson and Khalik Allah offered a testimony of their time, respective places and moments in New York. If the gathering of their photographs shows the mutations and changes experienced by the city over time, it also attests to the immutability of many things, the city’s energy and, notably, the precarity experienced by certain communities of the city. Above all, these works are an ode to New York: the quintessential ‘melting pot,’ a city in whose history and posterity the grains of possibility are engraved.

BRUCE DAVIDSON

Bruce Davidson began taking photographs at the age of ten in Oak Park, Illinois. While attending Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University, he continued to further his knowledge and develop his passion. He was later drafted into the army and stationed near Paris. There he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the founders of the Magnum Photos. When he left military service in 1957, Bruce Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for LIFE magazine and in 1958 became a full member of Magnum. From 1958 to 1961 he created such seminal bodies of work as Circus, Brooklyn Gang, and Freedom Rides.

He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 and created a profound documentation of the civil rights movement in America. In 1963, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his early work in a solo show. In 1967, he received the first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts, having spent two years witnessing the dire social conditions on one block in East Harlem. This work was published by Harvard University Press in 1970 under the title East 100th Street and was later republished and expanded by St. Ann’s Press. The work became an exhibition that same year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 1980, he captured the vitality of the New York Metro’s underworld that was later published in a book, Subway, and exhibited at the International Center of Photography in 1982. From 1991-95, he photographed the landscape and layers of life in Central Park. In 2006, he completed a series of photographs titled “The Nature of Paris,” many of which have been shown and acquired by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

Bruce Davidson received an Open Society Institute Individual Fellowship in 1998 to return to East 100th Street His awards include the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Photography in 2004 and a Gold Medal Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Arts Club in 2007. Classic bodies of work from his 50-year career have been extensively published in monographs and are included in many major public and private fine art collections around the world. He continues to photograph and produce new bodies of work. Bruce Davidson was inducted into both the Leica Hall of Fame in 2018 and the International Photography Hall of Fame in 2019.

Khalik Allah

Souls Against the Concrete

University of Texas Press, 2017

208 pages | 12 x 7.75 | 105 color photos 

ISBN: 978-1-4773-1314-5

© Khalik Allah/University of Texas Press

KHALIK ALLAH

Khalik Allah is a New York-based photographer and filmmaker who practices Camera Ministry with an eye as open as his heart. The resulting work has been described as “street opera” and noted for its beautifully visceral humanity. 

After a number of short films that reflect relationships formed through portraiture, Khalik Allah advanced his artistry with the feature length documentary Field Niggas (2015), shot at nighttime on the corner of Harlem’s 125th St. and Lexington Avenue. This corner also served as the basis for his first photography book Souls Against the Concrete, published by University of Texas Press in 2017. Khalik Allah continued with Black Mother (2018), an ecstatic expression of reverence and realities across Jamaica. This award winning film has been seen in festivals, museums and schools around the world; further released in the UK and the US through distributors Dogwoof and Grasshopper Film. Khalil Allah’s films are available on the Criterion Channel. 

Khalik Allah is currently at work on his second photo book from 125th and Lexington. He became a Magnum Nominee member in 2020.

MAGNUM GALLERY PARIS

68 rue Léon Frot, 75011 Paris

www.magnumphotos.com

Everything was moving: Photography from the sixties and seventies at Barbican Art Gallery, UK

Everything was moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s 
Barbican Art Gallery, London
13 September 2012 - 13 January 2013

I love all art medium but it is always a pleasure to share inforations about a major photography exhibition. This one is particulary interresting because it surveys the medium from an international perspective, and includes renowned photographers from across the globe, all working during two of the most memorable decades of the 20th Century. everything was moving: photography from the 60s and 70s tells a history of photography, through the photography of history. It brings together over 350 works, some rarely seen, others recently discovered and many shown in the UK for the first time.

It features key figures of modern photography including Bruce Davidson, William Eggleston, David Goldblatt, Graciela Iturbide, Boris Mikhailov and Shomei Tomatsu, as well as important practitioners whose lives were cut tragically short such as Ernest Cole and Raghubir Singh. Each contributor has, in different ways, advanced the aesthetic language of photography, as well as engaging with the world they inhabit in a profound and powerful way.

The exhibition is set in one of the defining periods of the modern age – a time that remains an inescapable reference point even today. The world changed dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s, shaped by the forces of post-colonialism, and Cold War neo-colonialism. This momentous epoch in history coincided with a golden age in photography: the moment when the medium flowered as a modern art form.

Great auteur photographers emerged around the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ world. Many, working increasingly independently from the illustrated press, and freed from the restraints of brief and commission, were able to approach the world on their own terms, and to introduce a new level of complexity to photographic imagery. Others, such as Li Zhensheng (China) and Ernest Cole (South Africa), found themselves living in situations of extreme repression, but devised inspiring strategies to create major works of photography in secrecy and at huge personal risk.

Back in the 1960s, many commentators viewed photography as inferior to painting or sculpture, because it simply recorded, mechanically, what could be seen, and was judged to be concerned primarily with reporting the facts (journalism) or campaigning for change (social documentary). Attitudes changed during this period, and the art museum slowly opened its doors to the medium. Less concerned to change the world, or to merely describe it, a new generation of photographers were driven to understand that world, as well as their place within it.

The exhibition presents a selection of works by the Chinese photographer, Li Zhensheng, some never before revealed in public. An aspiring artist and filmmaker, Li Zhensheng worked throughout the tumultuous decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) for the Heilongjiang Daily, the local newspaper of Harbin in the far North East of China, on the border with Russia. He, like everyone else in the country found himself caught up in the mad spiral of indoctrination and violence that was Mao’s ‘revolution’– at times as a participant, at others as a victim. At great personal risk, Li Zhensheng photographed in secret, and then buried those photographs, some 30,000 negatives, under his mud floor. The material only came fully to light in the West at the end of the 20th century. It is the most complete visual record known of this extraordinary period of human history.

In a very different response to totalitarianism, acclaimed conceptual photographer, Boris Mikhailov lived and worked in Kharkhov at the height of Soviet domination of the Ukraine. Boris Mikhailov developed a distinctive artistic approach, with which to evade the censors and to satirize Soviet occupation, as well as the tenets of socialist realism. The exhibition includes the first UK showing of his very first series, Yesterday’s Sandwich, 1968-1975, a collection of radical, often hilarious montages.

A pioneer of colour, Indian artist Raghubir Singh (1942-1999) was driven to create a photography that was emphatically modern and Indian. He broke abruptly with the colonial tradition of single-point perspective, picturesque, depopulated landscapes – to describe an India which was peopled, frenetic and luminous. His so-called theory of ‘Ganges modernism’ pitted colour and spirituality against the monochromatic angst and alienation of Western figures such as Robert Frank and Diane Arbus. The work of Raghubir Singh has never been thoroughly evaluated in the UK, and this selection includes rarely seen images from the extraordinary archives of the early part of his career.

In stark contrast to Raghubir Singh’s colourful exuberance, an unrelentingly black-and-white aesthetic emerged in Japan, exemplified by the work of Shomei Tomatsu who is widely considered the ‘godfather’ of modern Japenese photography and a major influence on Daido Moriyama. In Shomei Tomatsu’s first-ever British museum showing, life in 1960s and 1970s Japan is evoked in metaphoric, angry, uncompromisingly monochrome pictures. Shomei Tomatsu rails against continuing American military occupation at Okinawa (the base from which Vietnam was being bombed); the growing impact of American capitalism on Japenese culture; and the devastating psychological legacy of Nagasaki.

Where most of Africa was – in theory at least – liberated from colonial domination by the early 1960s, in South Africa, a government – inspired by Nazi Germany and ignored by the West – was starting to build its heinous apartheid regime. Across the Atlantic, in another society dominated by white racism and racial segregation, the Southern states of America saw the stirrings of change as the civil rights movement gathered pace. The struggle for civil rights –from Selma to Soweto, the Amazon to Londonderry – was to define the spirit of the times: as did an increasingly angry global opposition to the neo-colonial war that America was waging in Vietnam.

Johannesburg-based David Goldblatt, is, perhaps more than any other photographer since Eugène Atget, linked inextricably with the country of his birth. Over five decades, David Goldblatt has created arguably one of the most important bodies of documentary photography in the history of the medium. He has forged a complex, contradictory tableau of South Africa’s fractured society, during and after apartheid. For this exhibition, David Goldblatt has personally revisited his major series of the 1960s and 1970s, from On the Mines with Nadine Gordimer, to Some Afrikaners Photographed, and In Boksburg. The selection includes rarely exhibited works.

Long thought lost for ever, an incredible collection of vintage prints by the black South African Ernest Cole (1940-1990) was recently rediscovered and will be shown for the first time in Britain at Barbican Art Gallery. Ernest Cole somehow persuaded the Race Classification Board that he was not ‘black’ but ‘coloured’ (he changed his name from Kole to Cole) and was therefore able to practice as a photographer at a time when many black photographers were persecuted and imprisoned. Ernest Cole’s courage and determination were matched by his artistic talent. He escaped South Africa on 9 May 1966, and in exile in New York was to publish House of Bondage, 1967, an indelible record of what it was to be black under apartheid. Ernest Cole was never able to return home and he died in poverty, his negatives given away, it is believed, in lieu of an unpaid hotel bill.

South Africa ’s extraordinary tradition of realist photography during this period is contrasted with major American contemporaries. Bruce Davidson and William Eggleston are two of the giants of 20th century photography. In many ways, they are diametrically opposed in philosophy and approach, and yet at points in the 1960s they shared subject matter: both were photographing people and places in the contested landscape of the Southern states as the struggle for equality unfolded.

Time of Change, 1961-1965, one of Bruce Davidson’s most powerful series, has never been exhibited in the UK. On May 25, 1961 the 28-year old photographer joined a group of Freedom Riders making a terrifying journey by bus from Montgomery, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi. It was the starting point of a four-year project for Bruce Davidson, in which he captures the mood and the events of the civil rights struggle, in a series of poignant and empathetic pictures. Where Bruce Davidson was interested in the human reality of the south, in contrast, William Eggleston, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, perplexed the critics with his seeming lack of subject matter, lack of composition - and lack of a photographic agenda. Now, he is widely viewed as a brilliant innovator who revolutionized photography with his ‘democratic’, non-hierarchical vision, his ‘shotgun’ aesthetic and his radical use of colour. William Eggleston’s classic pictures of the period – affectless, brooding images of the Deep South, saturated in vivid colour, and shot through with a sense of menace, equally conjure the mood of the time.

Also included: major contributions by Hasselblad-award winners Graciela Iturbide (Mexico) and Malick Sidibé (Mali); a little-seen allegorical work by Sigmar Polke (Germany) ; and a selection of Larry Burrows’ (UK) powerful Vietnam portraits.

Kate Bush, Head of Art Galleries, Barbican Centre, said:

I am delighted to bring together an amazing group of photographers whose striking and powerful images of the 1960s and 1970s make us look at the world again. everything was moving explores a spectrum of different photographic approaches, and asks if, in the early 21st century, we are finally prepared to erase the distinction between art photography and documentary photography.

This exhibition is supported by The Japan Foundation, Institut Français, The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and The Nehru Centre.

Art Gallery, Barbarican Centre's website: www.barbican.org.uk

Street Photography at National Gallery of Art, Washington DC - I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the Street, 1938-2010

I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the Street, 1938-2010

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Curator: Sarah Greenough

April 22 - August 5, 2012

This exhibition is devoted to street photographs by some of the genre's greatest photographers: Walker Evans (1903-1975), Harry Callahan (1912-1999), Robert Frank (b. 1924), Bruce Davidson (b. 1933), Philip-Lorca diCorcia (b. 1951), and Beat Streuli (b. 1957). "The Gallery is pleased to continue its long tradition of exhibitions devoted to the innovative ways in which photographers have captured and explored the urban environment," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "I Spy also showcases the Gallery's strong holdings in this genre, featuring more than 20 works from the collection along with nine promised gifts."

Philip-Lorca diCorcia 

Head #22, 2001

chromogenic print,121.92 x 152.4 cm (48 x 60 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Charina Endowment Fund

© Philip‑Lorca diCorcia

Since the invention of small hand-held cameras and faster films in the late 19th century, photographers have recorded everyday life in the urban environment. Mining the city rich potential, they have explored its varied subject matter —people, architecture, and modes of transportation— to celebrate the cacophony and diversity of modern life, as well as its rapid pace.

The photographers represented in this exhibition have creatively pursued this genre by setting rigid parameters on how they made their works. Like children playing the game "I Spy" by looking through the narrow frame of a car window, these photographers restricted the ways they made their pictures as a means of selecting and ordering the chaos of the city. Walker Evans hid the camera from the unsuspecting public and photographed without even looking through the lens, Robert Frank photographed only what could be seen from the windows of a bus moving through the city, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Beat Streuli placed their cameras in single spots to capture photographs of random passersby. But all these photographs and videos court chance and serendipity, and all these artists view the street as a perpetually fascinating spectacle.

Arranged both chronologically and monographically, I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the Street, 1938-2010 explores these ideas through the presentation of nearly 90 works, including a video and a digital still sequence. Evans, Callahan, and Frank embarked on their projects as a challenge to create images in a fundamentally different manner than they previously had; diCorcia and Streuli incorporate such devices into their regular practice. All the works address questions of voyeurism, surveillance, and privacy.

The exhibition includes photographs made by Walker Evans between 1938 and 1941 on the New York subways with a camera concealed beneath his coat, as well as those he took standing on a street corner in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1941. Harry Callahan is represented with an evocative group of photographs of women lost in thought on the busy Chicago streets in 1950. Robert Frank's elegant, almost balletic suite of photographs made from the windows of a bus moving through New York City in 1958 will also be presented, as will a series of bold, aggressive color photographs by Bruce Davidson taken on the New York subways between 1980 and 1985.

Contemporary artists Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Beat Streuli have pushed this genre still further in works made in the 1990s and into the 21st century. Mining the latent theatricality of the street, diCorcia erected scaffolding and lights in busy urban areas to create a series of monumental portraits of hapless pedestrians who chanced to pass in front of his camera.

The exhibition concludes with two works by the Swiss artist Beat Streuli made on the streets of New York: a digital still sequence, reconfigured expressly for this show from its original display in 2002, and a video made in 2009. Using a telephoto lens to capture richly saturated scenes, Beat Streuli reveals not only the congestion and heterogeneity of modern urban life, but also its beauty. As he transforms the ordinary into the iconic, he shows the isolation and anonymity of the individual in a crowd. In addition, his work calls into question the surveillance photography now so routinely captured by governments and corporations, and it makes us realize ever more keenly how in our daily lives we are both watching the world around us and are being scrutinized by it.

The exhibition curator is Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art.

I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the Street, 1938–2010 was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA. For information visit the Gallery's Web site at www.nga.gov.

Supports: The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of The Ryna and Melvin Cohen Family Foundation and the Trellis Fund. Tru Vue has provided in kind support of Optium Acrylic Glazing for the works of art.

Bruce Davidson: Inside/Outside - Photographs from the artist’s personal archive at Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

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

www.howardgreenberg.com