Published by Steidl. Edited by Michael Mack. Text by Sam Holmes.
One of the world's most influential photographers, Bruce Davidson takes readers inside three midcentury big tops in images that are poetic, realistic and profound. He reveals not only the swiftly vanishing cultural phenomenon of the circus, but what might be called the eternal human circus. At a three-ring show in 1958 he climbed to the top of the tent to view the performances of the famous liontamer Clyde Beatty and human cannonball Hugo Zacchini. His deeper interest lay in the daily lives of circus performers and producers--the roustabouts and riggers, and the pretty girl who rode an elephant in what was called the "spec." He also made an intimate series of a dwarf clown. In 1965 at a huge multi-ring coliseum show, Davidson took a more critical look at performances under a steel-and-concrete environment; continuing behind the scenes, his vision became sharper and more surreal. And in 1967, Davidson caught the elegant exuberance of an Irish one-ring circus. He photographed the kinds of performances that are the essence of the medium, including a face-to-face encounter with an exceptional trapeze artist. Most of these pictures are published here for the first time.
Published by Steidl. Edited by Bruce Davidson, Donna Ranieri. Text by Paul Roth.
Consisting solely of previously unpublished photographs, The Way Back is a deep dive through Bruce Davidson’s more than 60-year career. The book chronologically presents photos made between 1957 and 1992, showcasing Davidson’s exceptional versatility—from his earliest assignments to later seminal bodies of work including his yearlong study of teenage members of a Brooklyn Gang (1959), his extensive coverage of the American Civil Rights Movement in Time of Change (1961–65) and his breakthrough portraits of the residents of a single block in Harlem in East 100th Street (1966–68). Series such as Subway (1980) and Central Park (1992) confirm Davidson as a quintessential chronicler of New York City. What emerges through this retrospective is Davidson’s overt sensibility and empathy for his subjects and his commitment to documenting them in depth over time. Unlike his peers who photographed historical events, Davidson focused on the people within these histories. Now, drawing near the end of his long career, Davidson offers this book as a parting look at his artistic passage, an elegiac goodbye as well as a requiem. Bruce Davidson (born 1933, Oak Park, IL) became a member of the Magnum Photos agency in 1958; since then his photographs and photo series have been widely published to great acclaim. At Yale University, he studied under photographer Alexey Brodovitch and artist Josef Albers, the latter of whom encouraged him to pursue his work among marginalized people and communities. His artistic influences include Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Bruce Davidson describes the genesis of this project thus: "Esquire's editors sent me to Los Angeles, and when I landed at LA International Airport I noticed giant palm trees growing in the parking lot. I ordered a hamburger through a microphone speaker in a drive-in called Tiny Naylor's. The freeways were blank and brilliant, chromium-plated bumpers reflected the Pacific Ocean, but the air quality was said to be bad. People looking like mannequins seemed at peace on the Sunset Strip while others were euphoric as they watered the desert. I stood there ready with my Leica, aware of my shadow on the pavement. I walked up to strangers, framed, focused and in a split second of alienations and cynicism, pressed the shutter button. Suddenly I had an awakening that led me to another level of visual understanding. But in the end, for some unknown reasons, the editors rejected the pictures, and I had to return home with a big box of prints, put them in a drawer, and forgot all about the trip."
Published by Steidl. Edited by Bruce Davidson, Amina Lakhaney. Text by Bruce Davidson.
This volume presents Bruce Davidson's personal selections from his lesser-known color archive, from a period of nearly 60 years. Assignments from various magazines including Vogue, National Geographic and Life, as well as commercial projects led Davidson to photograph subjects as diverse as fashion (in the early 1960s), the Shah of Iran with his family (1964), keepers of French monuments (1988), the supermodel Kylie Bax (1997) and college cheerleaders (1989). He photographed in India and China, but also at home in New York, in Chicago and along the Pacific Coast Highway. In 1968, Michelangelo Antonioni invited Davidson to document the making of his film Zabriskie Point. Davidson also continued to pursue personal projects, such as photographing the Yiddish writer and Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (1972-75), the New York City subway (1980) and Katz's Delicatessen (2004). Often staying on in a country after an official assignment, Davidson documented Welsh coalfields, family holidays in Martha's Vineyard and travelled through Patagonia and Mexico.
In 2008, Bruce Davidson, who had already photographed New York and Paris, began exploring Los Angeles with a focus on its exotic plant life. The arid climate, normally hostile to life, allows for an exceptional botanical diversity in L.A. County that reaches from the surrounding foothills and mountain wilderness to the Pacific Ocean, and Davidson quickly became a Los Angeles convert. "Traffic, wealth, poverty, violence and other urban phenomena give way to valiant plant life where ivy thrives on the underside of the 405 and Glendale Freeway interchanges, and a tree in the foothills regenerates itself after a wildfire has parched its bark," he writes. "Without its plant life and human respect for it, L.A. would be a vast desert void." Nature of Los Angeles 2008–2013 depicts the city in black and white, presenting its beauty and banality as emblematic of urban existence in general.
Bruce Davidson (born 1933) began photographing at the age of ten in Oak Park, Illinois. He studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University before being drafted into the army. After leaving military service in 1957, he freelanced for Life and in 1958 became a member of Magnum Photos. Davidson's work is held in many major museum collections and his awards include a Guggenheim fellowship (1962), the first National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Photography (1967) and an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts from the Corcoran College of Art and Design (2011).
In 1960, after an intense year photographing the notorious Brooklyn street gang The Jokers, Bruce Davidson decided to remove himself from the tension and depression of that work. He received an assignment to photograph Marilyn Monroe during the making of John Houston's The Misfits in the Nevada desert, and then travelled to London on commission for Queen magazine. Published by Jocelyn Stevens, Queen was devoted to British lifestyle and Davidson was charged, with no specific agenda, to spend a couple of months touring England and Scotland to create a visual portrait of the two countries. England / Scotland 1960 offers a poetic insight into the heart of English and Scottish cultures. Reflecting a postwar era in which the revolutions of the 1960s had not quite yet entered the mainstream, Davidson's photographs reveal societies driven by difference—the extremes of city and country life, of the landed gentry and the common people. Published for the first time in its entirety in 2005, this new edition has a larger ideal format chosen by Davidson initially for his book Black & White (2012), and now the standard size for his future publications with Steidl.
Black and White is the definitive collection of Bruce Davidson's black-and-white photography, spanning a period of 40 years. This collectable five-volume set comprises reprints of classic books of Davidson's poignant imagery, some of them newly edited and expanded. The seminal bodies of work are Circus (1958), an intimate portrait of a dwarf clown; Brooklyn Gang (1959), depicting a group of troubled youths; Time of Change (1961–1965), a civil rights documentation in America; East 100th Street (1966–1968), showing life on one block in Spanish Harlem; and Central Park (1992–1995), exploring layers of life in New York's famous urban oasis. Black and White is a tribute to Davidson's unique photographic achievement and a powerful document of social change.
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.
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 11.75 x 11.5 in. / 144 pgs / 118 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 9/30/2011 No longer our product
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PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781597111942TRADE List Price: $65.00 CAD $75.00
Journey of Consciousness is a gorgeous three-volume box set of 800 photographs drawn from this master photographer's immense archive. Chosen by Davidson himself, the selection spans a 60-year career, and features such seminal bodies of work as Circus(1958), Brooklyn Gang(1959), East 100th Street(1966-1968), The Civil Rights Movement(1961-1965), Subway(1980) and Central Park(1992-1995), as well as his two most recent works in progress--a series of urban landscapes made in Paris (2007) and Los Angeles (2009)--and many unpublished photographs. The pages in these volumes document Davidson's passionate and progressive vision, a vision that bears witness to several decades of volatile change in twentieth-century America.
Born in 1933 in Oak Park, Illinois, Bruce Davidson's prolific career began in 1949, when he began taking photographs as a precocious 16-year-old. In 1954, he studied at Yale University with the great teacher and artist, Josef Albers, working briefly as a freelance photographer for Lifemagazine before joining Magnum Photos in 1958, after a meeting with one of its founders, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Davidson was given a Gold Medal Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Arts Club in 2007. His work has been extensively published in monographs and is included in many major collections around the world.
Published by Aperture. Notes by Bruce Davidson. Essay by Marie Winn. Preface by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers.
Bruce Davidson, intrepid explorer of the urban terrain, has taken on a project of extraordinary visual and metaphorical scope. His approach to Central Park's wildlife--human and otherwise--varies as much in format as it does in emotional quality; Davidson discovers a multiplicity of mysteries, eccentricities and characters, a microcosm of the remarkable city of which Central Park is the heart.
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 11.75 x 9.75 in. / 128 pgs / 96 duotone.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/15/2005 No longer our product
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PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780893816254TRADE List Price: $40.00 CAD $50.00
Published by Aperture. Notes by Bruce Davidson. Essay by Marie Winn. Preface by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers.
Bruce Davidson, intrepid explorer of the urban terrain, has taken on a project of extraordinary visual and metaphorical scope. His approach to Central Park's wildlife--human and otherwise--varies as much in format as it does in emotional quality; Davidson discovers a multiplicity of mysteries, eccentricities and characters, a microcosm of the remarkable city of which Central Park is the heart.
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 11.75 x 9.75 in. / 128 pgs / 96 duotone.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/15/2005 No longer our product
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PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780893819927TRADE List Price: $29.95 CAD $35.00
Something unusual happens when a photographer known for empathetic portraiture of the marginalized focuses his incisive eye on the lifestyles of the rich and famous. In Bruce Davidson's wildly diverse and revealing Portraits we see Joan Crawford hell-bent on force-feeding some poor soul, Diana Ross and The Supremes having a snowball fight, and an intense Samuel Beckett during a rehearsal of Waiting for Godot. Seen through Davidson's lens, Newt Gingrich is as goofy as Bobby Kennedy is impenetrable.
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 11 x 9.5 in. / 72 pgs / 62 reproductions throughout.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/15/2005 No longer our product
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PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780893818517TRADE List Price: $20.98 CAD $25.00
Published by St. Ann's Press. Foreword by Arthur Ollman. Introduction by Fred Fab Five Freddy Brathwaite. Afterword by Henry Geldzahler.
Since ground was first broken, New York City's subway system has been the stuff of living legend--and a source of inspiration and fear. This dark, democratic environment provided the setting for photographer Bruce Davidson's first extensive series in color, originally published in 1986. In it, subway riders are set against a gritty, graffiti-strewn background, displayed in tones Davidson described as "an iridescence like what I had seen in photographs of deep-sea fish." Never before had the subway been portrayed in such detail, revealing the interplay of its inner landscape and outer vistas. The images include lovers, commuters, tourists, families, and the homeless. From weary strap hangers to languorous ladies in summer dresses to stalking predators, Davidson's compassionate vision illuminates the stubborn survival of humanity. From the spring of 1980 to 1985, Davidson explored and shot 600 miles of subway tracks. In his own words, he "wanted to transform this subway from its dark, degrading, and impersonal reality into images that open up our experience again to the color, sensuality, and vitality of the individual souls that ride it each day." Now nearly 25 years later, and on the eve of the subway's 100th anniversary, St. Ann's Press is publishing a new edition of Davidson's classic book. This edition adds 43 unseen images to the original book, and includes an introduction by Arthur Ollman of the Museum of Photographic Art in San Diego, and a foreword by Fred Braithwaite (aka Fab Five Freddy), the original graffiti artist. It also includes Bruce Davidson and Henry Geldzahler's original essays.
PUBLISHER St. Ann's Press
BOOK FORMAT Clothbound, 12 x 9.25 in. / 132 pgs / 102 color
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 4/2/2004 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2004
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780971368187TRADE List Price: $65.00 CAD $75.00
Published by St. Ann's Press. Photographs by Bruce Davidson. Contributions by Barney Simon. Text by Mildred Feliciano.
For two years in the 1960s, Bruce Davidson photographed one block in East Harlem. He went back day after day, standing on sidewalks, knocking on doors, asking permission to photograph a face, a child, a room, a family. Through his skill, his extraordinary vision, and his deep respect for his subjects, Davidson's portrait of the people of East 100th Street is a powerful statement of the dignity and humanity that is in all people. Long out of print, this volume is a reissue of the classic book of photographs originally published in 1970 and recently included in The Book of 101 Books. This reprint includes over 20 new images not included in the original edition.
PUBLISHER St. Ann's Press
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 11 x 12 in. / 172 pgs / 147 tritone.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 1/2/2003 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2003
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780971368132TRADE List Price: $75.00 CAD $90.00
Published by St. Ann's Press. Foreword by Congressman John Lewis. Introduction by Deborah Willis.
On May 25, 1961, Bruce Davison joined a group of Freedom Riders traveling by bus from Montgomery, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi. The actions of these youths challenged and disobeyed federal laws allowing for integrated interstate bus travel. These historic episodes, which ended in violence and arrests, marked the beginning of Davidson's exploration into the heart and soul of the civil rights movement in the United States during the years 1961-1965. In 1962, Davidson received a Guggenheim Fellowship and continued documenting the era, including an early Malcolm X rally in Harlem, steel workers in Chicago, a Ku Klux Klan cross burning near Atlanta, farm migrant camps in South Carolina, cotton picking in Mississippi, protest demonstrations in Birmingham, and the heroic Selma March that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was instrumental in changing the political power base in the segregated Southern states. In the 140 photographs collected here, many of which have never before been published, we see intimate and revealing portraits of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and other leaders made by Davidson during those turbulent times. These images describe the mood that prevailed during the civil rights movement with a lyrical imagery that is both poignant and profound. As Davidson bears witness to these historical events, and documents the degradation and segregation that were endured, he gives testimony to the struggle for freedom, equality, justice, and human dignity.
PUBLISHER St. Ann's Press
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 12 x 11 in. / 172 pgs / 140 tritone
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 9/2/2002 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2002
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780971368118TRADE List Price: $65.00 CAD $75.00
Bruce Davidson: The Way Back
Bruce Davidson: Los Angeles 1964
Bruce Davidson: In Color
Bruce Davidson: Nature of Los Angeles 2008–2013
Bruce Davidson: England Scotland 1960
Bruce Davidson: Black and White
Bruce Davidson: Subway
Bruce Davidson: Outside Inside
Bruce Davidson: Central Park
Bruce Davidson: Portraits
Bruce Davidson: Subway
Bruce Davidson: East 100Th Street
Time Of Change