BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 11.75 x 11.5 in. / 144 pgs / 118 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 9/30/2011 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION Contact Publisher Catalog:
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781597111942TRADE List Price: $65.00 CAD $75.00
AVAILABILITY Not Available
In transforming the grim, abusive, violent, and yet often serene reality of the subway into a language of color, I see the subway as a metaphor for the world in which we live today. From all over the earth, people come into the subway. It's a great social equalizer. As our being is exposed, we confront our mortality, contemplate our destiny, and experience both the beauty and the beast. 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.
APERTURE
Bruce Davidson: Subway
Published by Aperture Introduction by Fred Brathwaite a.k.a. Fab 5 Freddy. Text by Bruce Davidson. Afterword by Henry Geldzahler.
Bruce Davidson's groundbreaking Subway, first published by Aperture in 1986, has garnered critical acclaim both as a documentation of a unique moment in the cultural fabric of New York City and for its phenomenal use of extremes of color and shadow set against flash-lit skin. In Davidson's own words, “the people in the subway, their flesh juxtaposed against the graffiti, the penetrating effect of the strobe light itself, and even the hollow darkness of the tunnels, inspired an aesthetic that goes unnoticed by passengers who are trapped underground, hiding behind masks and closed off from each other.” In this third edition of what is now a classic of photographic literature, a sequence of 118 (including 25 previously unpublished) images transport the viewer through a landscape at times menacing, and at other times lyrical and soulful. The images present the full gamut of New Yorkers, from weary straphangers and languorous ladies in summer dresses to stalking predators and homeless persons. Davidson's accompanying text tells the story behind the images, clarifying his method and dramatizing his obsession with the subway, its rhythms and its particular madness. Bruce Davidson (born 1933) is considered one of America's most influential documentary photographers. He began taking photographs when he was ten, and studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Yale University School of Design. In 1958 he became a member of Magnum Photos, and in 1962 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to document the civil rights movement. After a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1963, Davidson spent two years photographing in Harlem, resulting in the book East 100th Street. In 1980, after living in New York City for 23 years, Davidson began Subway, his startling color essay of urban life.
Featured image is reproduced from Bruce Davidson: Subway.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Photo District News
Holly Stuart Hughes
The brilliant flash, combined with fluorescent lighting, intense colors and Davidson’s probing vision, produced images that are dramatic and at times surreal.
The Guardian
Sean O'Hagan
Subway is Davidson's visceral take on the New York underground system of the 1980s complete with beleagured passengers, Guardian Angels, graffiti and a palpable, all-pervasive sense of fear. A glimpse of a New York that is already long gone.
Bruce Davidson’s seminal
work of early color photography
is unsurpassed
as a document of mid-1980s New York, and is
here reissued by Aperture
with ten previously
unpublished images.
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FORMAT: Hbk, 11.75 x 11.5 in. / 144 pgs / 118 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $65.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $75 ISBN: 9781597111942 PUBLISHER: Aperture AVAILABLE: 9/30/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: No longer our product AVAILABILITY: Not Available
Published by Aperture. Introduction by Fred Brathwaite a.k.a. Fab 5 Freddy. Text by Bruce Davidson. Afterword by Henry Geldzahler.
Bruce Davidson's groundbreaking Subway, first published by Aperture in 1986, has garnered critical acclaim both as a documentation of a unique moment in the cultural fabric of New York City and for its phenomenal use of extremes of color and shadow set against flash-lit skin. In Davidson's own words, “the people in the subway, their flesh juxtaposed against the graffiti, the penetrating effect of the strobe light itself, and even the hollow darkness of the tunnels, inspired an aesthetic that goes unnoticed by passengers who are trapped underground, hiding behind masks and closed off from each other.” In this third edition of what is now a classic of photographic literature, a sequence of 118 (including 25 previously unpublished) images transport the viewer through a landscape at times menacing, and at other times lyrical and soulful. The images present the full gamut of New Yorkers, from weary straphangers and languorous ladies in summer dresses to stalking predators and homeless persons. Davidson's accompanying text tells the story behind the images, clarifying his method and dramatizing his obsession with the subway, its rhythms and its particular madness. Bruce Davidson (born 1933) is considered one of America's most influential documentary photographers. He began taking photographs when he was ten, and studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Yale University School of Design. In 1958 he became a member of Magnum Photos, and in 1962 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to document the civil rights movement. After a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1963, Davidson spent two years photographing in Harlem, resulting in the book East 100th Street. In 1980, after living in New York City for 23 years, Davidson began Subway, his startling color essay of urban life.
