Bruce Davidson

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Bruce Davidson

American, b. 1933

EDUCATION

Rochester Institute of Technology; Yale University

BIOGRAPHY

Bruce Davidson began photographing the area around his home in Oak Park, IL, and developing his own negatives at the age of 10. He formalized his passion for the medium by attending Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University. At Yale, he studied under Josef Albers. Following college, Davidson was drafted into the US Army where he was part of the photo pool and utilized his training to consider composition and narrative in the images he took. In 1958 Davidson became of a member of Magnum Photos, a major photography cooperative in New York that focuses primarily on photojournalism, and his photographs have been published in major media outlets such as LIFE, The New York Times, and Vogue. Davidson has discussed the influence of and his friendship with one of Magnum’s founding members, photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom he met while stationed in Paris.

Davidson is drawn to scenes that encapsulate a larger narrative, wherein he feels he experiences the story unfolding before him through his lens. Inequality is often a focus, as is the documentation of a particular community. His major series focus on subjects such as Central Park, the Civil Rights movement, the circus, Coney Island, and the East 100th Street block in Harlem. Collections of Davidson’s work have been compiled into several publications, including the five-volume set Black and White, published by Steidl in 2010. He received his first of several solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in 1963, and he has also had solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institution, and Aperture Foundation. Davidson’s work is held in the collections of many major institutions, including the New York Historical Society, the International Center for Photograph, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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