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ÉDITIONS XAVIER BARRAL
Bruce Gilden: Lost and Found
Text by Sophie Darmaillacq, Bruce Gilden.
In the thick of New York: Bruce Gilden raw and unseen
After recently moving house, Bruce Gilden discovered hundreds of contact prints and negatives in his personal archives, from work undertaken in New York, his native city, between 1978 and 1984. From these thousands of images, most of which are new even to their author, Gilden has selected around a hundred. Extending from the desire to revisit the work of his youth, this historic archive constitutes an inestimable treasure.
An extraordinary New York is portayed here, revealing an unknown facet of Gilden’s oeuvre. With all the energy of a young man in his thirties, and with no flash (before Gilden became famous for its almost systematic use), Gilden launched an assault on New York in a visibly tense atmosphere. In this extraordinary gallery of portraits, the compositions—mostly horizontal—simmer with energy, bursting with the most diverse characters, as though Gilden intended to include within the frame everything that caught his eye.
In this book, we see the guiding tropes of the work that was to make Gilden famous: sustained movement and tension, unrivalled spirit, and an instinctive and irreverent affection for his subjects, perfectly in cahoots with his city.
Bruce Gilden (1946) is a street photographer from Brooklyn, New York. Over the years he has produced long and detailed photographic projects in New York, Haiti, France, Ireland, India, Russia, Japan, England and America. Gilden has published 18 monographs, among them Facing New York (1992), Bleus (1994), Haiti (1996, European Publishers Award for Photography); After the Off (1999), Go (2000), Coney Island (2002), A Beautiful Catastrophe (2004), Foreclosures (2013) and A Complete Examination of Middlesex (2014).
Featured image is reproduced from 'Bruce Gilden: Lost and Found.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
AnOther
Jacob Charles Wilson
[Bruce Gilden: Lost and Found] promised a vision of New York street life...capturing the filth and fashion of the city.
AnOther
Belle Hutton
The images in Lost and Found were rediscovered by Gilden... and 40 years later are offering a glimpse into the striking early work of the street photographer.
GQ
For photography connoisseurs, Bruce Gilden’s Lost and Found is a time machine to an older New York.
Aesthetica
Kate Simpson
...Depict[s] a bygone era, one which captures the surreptitious, accusatory, ambivalent or questioning gaze of strangers.
The New Yorker
Chris Wiley
Gilden’s pictures shine as prime examples of a photographic mode that has all but disappeared.
Interview
Jeannie McDonald
It was gritty, trash-ridden, and alive. The energy was rampant, the music was loud, and the people were full of rage. New York City in the 1970s and 80s was something to be lived, and luckily, the photographer Bruce Gilden was there to live it—and capture it for the rest of us.
Creative Boom
Tora Baker
Bruce Gilden: Lost and Found, published by Éditions Xavier Barral, shows us the early work that made Gilden famous: sustained movement and tension, unrivalled spirit, and an instinctive and irreverent affection for his subjects, perfectly in cahoots with his city.
Collector Daily
Olga Yatskevich
Gilden’s photographs capture a time that’s gone for good. Lost and Found isn’t just an exercise in nostalgia though. The rediscovered images offer the artistic seeds of what would come later for Gilden. While his mature style has taken personal intrusion to its logical extreme, the images here are evidence that he started out back a few steps further, using the context of the situation to tell more layered stories.
Washington Post
Olivier Laurent
For Gilden, these photos show how he transitioned from a street photographer, where New York City is a major character of his work, to one focused on people.
Weston Magazine Group
Debbie Silver
Bruce Gilden has continued to focus on strong characters and apply Robert Capa's mantra to his own work: "if the picture isn't good enough you aren't close enough"
Huck
Sara Rosen
In his new project, Lost and Found, the legendary street photographer pays tribute to a city that was ‘rough, raw, violent and filthy’
"To make a long story short, I’m not a very organized person and when I moved from the loft where I had been living for thirty-five years in New York City, I piled up thousands of negatives in cardboard boxes and never opened them for three years. Last year in the summer, I was home with someone who worked for me and in a cleaning frenzy, we started looking at all the old New York prints that I had in my studio in Beacon where I live now. I remembered some of them and others not, so I decided to go through my old negatives and contact sheets. I spent practically the whole summer of 2018 looking through more than two thousand rolls. It was an anthropologist’s job and when I discovered these images, I was very surprised because I didn’t think that I had anything on these rolls. There are no clinkers. When I say 'clinkers' I’m being hard on myself. So I mean that there are very few mediocre pictures: I’ve looked at them numerous times now and they’re good through and through. I had found a gold mine! Right away I thought this is going to be a fantastic New York book! It’s even tighter than my two other books and there will hardly be any flash photos in this book. So what was interesting about the whole story is that it felt like I had created a whole new body of work, and if I had died this work would never have seen the light of day. Nobody has my eye or my patience to go through it all, so it would have been lost forever. And that’s why we gave it the title of Lost and Found. — Bruce Gilden continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 11.75 x 9.25 in. / 164 pgs / 75 duotone. LIST PRICE: U.S. $60.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $85 ISBN: 9782365112444 PUBLISHER: Éditions Xavier Barral AVAILABLE: 10/22/2019 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by Éditions Xavier Barral. Text by Sophie Darmaillacq, Bruce Gilden.
In the thick of New York: Bruce Gilden raw and unseen
After recently moving house, Bruce Gilden discovered hundreds of contact prints and negatives in his personal archives, from work undertaken in New York, his native city, between 1978 and 1984. From these thousands of images, most of which are new even to their author, Gilden has selected around a hundred. Extending from the desire to revisit the work of his youth, this historic archive constitutes an inestimable treasure.
An extraordinary New York is portayed here, revealing an unknown facet of Gilden’s oeuvre. With all the energy of a young man in his thirties, and with no flash (before Gilden became famous for its almost systematic use), Gilden launched an assault on New York in a visibly tense atmosphere. In this extraordinary gallery of portraits, the compositions—mostly horizontal—simmer with energy, bursting with the most diverse characters, as though Gilden intended to include within the frame everything that caught his eye.
In this book, we see the guiding tropes of the work that was to make Gilden famous: sustained movement and tension, unrivalled spirit, and an instinctive and irreverent affection for his subjects, perfectly in cahoots with his city.
Bruce Gilden (1946) is a street photographer from Brooklyn, New York. Over the years he has produced long and detailed photographic projects in New York, Haiti, France, Ireland, India, Russia, Japan, England and America. Gilden has published 18 monographs, among them Facing New York (1992), Bleus (1994), Haiti (1996, European Publishers Award for Photography); After the Off (1999), Go (2000), Coney Island (2002), A Beautiful Catastrophe (2004), Foreclosures (2013) and A Complete Examination of Middlesex (2014).
