Bruce Davidson | Selections from New York: 1959-1992

Exhibition Dates: June 22 - September 2, 2006

Opening reception: Thursday June 22, 2006 7-9 PM

We are proud to present the first solo exhibition of photographs by Bruce Davidson. This esteemed social documentary photographer’s varied projects over the last 50 years have influenced and inspired a generation of photographers.

This is the first time that Davidson’s work has been shown in Canada, and as such we are presenting an overview of his extensive career. We have chosen to focus on five projects that span over 40 years and that are all centered in New York City.

The series Brooklyn Gang was inspired by a newspaper article detailing the lives of teenage gang members on the streets of New York City. Davidson spent several months during the summer of 1959 hanging out with “The Jokers” and documenting the isolated and sometimes violent world that they inhabited.

Between 1961 and 1965, Davidson focused his lens towards the Civil Rights Movement in the project that has come to be known as Time Of Change. Our exhibition highlights photographs taken in New York that reveal the daily lives of African-Americans and the rallies that were their tools for change.

In 1966, the neighborhood of Spanish Harlem was renowned to be one of the worst in the city for poverty and crime. With an 8x10” camera in hand, Davidson slowly came to know and photograph the residents, buildings, and alleyways of East 100^th Street.

Beginning in the spring of 1980, Davidson began to photograph the New York subway system. Photographed on all of the different lines at all hours of day and night, the colour photographs in Subway capture the participants in a culture of strangers: friendly, violent, beautiful, and bizarre.

The photographs of Central Park read like a love poem to the heart of New York City. They are filled with an abundance of life in the forms of people, flora, and fauna, and are complete with the dark corners and moments of beauty that constitute life.

Born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1933, Bruce Davidson studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University. While stationed in Paris in the mid-1950s, he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the founding members of the Magnum Photo Agency. After military service, in 1957, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for Life Magazine and in 1958 became a member of Magnum Photos. His work has been published in more than ten monographs and has been exhibited widely both in North America and abroad.