Bruce Davidson: Subway

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If they hesitated, I would pull out my portfolio and show them my subway work; if they said no, it was no forever. spent a year traveling the tracks of New York City’s subway system, photographing a full spectrum of people on their rumbling and sometimes gritty journeys through the city. His glowing skin tone seemed to match the chains around his neck, which James Agee would often refer to as ‘badges of being. Thus, in the subway, Davidson resists the itch to take the gritty high-contrast black and white portraits common during that time and used purposefully to convey emotions.

Asked about his perspective on the subway as it exists now and how it has changed, Davidson replies: “Of course you have to be aware of not standing too close to the platform and things of that nature to avoid catastrophe. He spent a year photographing the New York subway system using Kodachrome 64 film in a Canon 35mm camera. The images include the full panoply of New Yorkers-from weary straphangers and languorous ladies in summer dresses to stalking predators and the homeless. After military service, in 1957, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for Life Magazine and in 1958 became a full member of Magnum Photos. He had an obsessive relationship with photography, writing about his life in his early 20s in his Greenwich Village apartment, “I had a red light in the fridge so I could eat cold chicken and print pictures at the same time.

I found that the strobe light reflecting off the steel surfaces of the defaced subway cars created a new understanding of color. Here, the enclosed world of the subway is a metaphor for New York itself, in all its frantic hustle and bustle--its violence, its humanity and its hope. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Préface de Henry Geldzhaler et 56 illustrations photographiques en couleurs choisies parmi plusieurs milliers de clichés réalisés par le photographe entre 1980 et 1985. The photographer’s descent into the city’s famed transit system followed a period of broader exploration in New York.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. As our being is exposed, we confront our mortality, contemplate our destiny, and experience both the beauty and the beast. The images present the full gamut of New Yorkers, from weary straphangers and languorous ladies in summer dresses to stalking predators and homeless persons. One of his most important works is East 100th Street, where he captured life within a single block of the inner-city ghetto in East Harlem in the late ’60s. Essentially, Davidson's images manage to hark back to a forgotten New York City, while simultaneously tapping into a contemporary sense of why New York, with all is attitudes, is still seen to be one of the globe's most vibrant and happening urban cities.Bruce Davidson (born 1933) is considered one of America's most influential documentary photographers.

After completing his military service, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer and even became an associate member of the Magnum Photos agency in 1958 and a year later, a full member. In 1986, Aperture first published Bruce Davidson’s Subway – a ground-breaking series that has garnered critical acclaim both as a document of a unique moment in the cultural fabric of New York City as well as for its phenomenal use of extremes of color and shadow set against flash-lit skin. Other times, the moment would be too perfect and Davidson would photograph without permission, explaining himself after the image was safely imprinted on his film. Although our meeting was momentary, he gave himself to the camera and then was gone, back into the bowels of Brooklyn. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 to photograph what became a profound documentation of the Civil Rights Movement in America.Both a captivating study of light and color and a historical document of an elemental part of New York, Subway captures the many faces of the underbelly of this city. full-pg illustrations in color, signed by Davidson on the half title, afterword by Henry Geldzahler; fine in original gray cloth, pictorial dust jacket.

He then was able to capture some of the most terrifying moments of evil, violence, and death; something street photography newbies would struggle with. I began to imagine that these signatures surrounding the passengers were ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Yet, as is the paradox of New York itself, these photographs also highlight the isolation of individuals within this sea of passengers; in his words “ [people] who are trapped underground, hiding behind masks, and closed off from each other. In 1980, after living in New York City for 23 years, Davidson began Subway, his startling color essay of urban life. Speaking to us about how he views the project today, Davidson reiterates this sentiment: “I feel that there was a passion and a purpose to photographing in the subway.With renovations beginning on the subway during the eighties, today the transit system is in some ways unrecognizable. From the moving train above ground, we see glimpses of the city, and as the trains move into the tunnels, sterile fluorescent light reaches into the stony gloom, and we, trapped inside, all hang on together. Bruce Davidson s Subway has become iconic for its juxtaposition of humanity against urban machinery. In 1960, he was invited to the United Kingdom by the Queen Magazine for two months, where he documented the idiosyncratic indifference of the island’s natives from the American perspective. I often approached people in these densely packed trains, and sometimes they would tell me their life stories, or intimate details that I knew no one else knew.