BRUCE DAVIDSON
American
AlthoughLifehad already published Bruce Da-
vidson’s work, his position within the photogra-
phy world truly solidified with the publication of
four of his photographs in the June 1960 issue of
Esquireunder the title ‘‘Brooklyn Minority Re-
port’’ and supplemented with an essay by novelist
Norman Mailer. Through this work, Davidson
revealed his early interest in the photo-essay as
well as his use of photography to intimately
study a group of people from the ‘‘inside.’’ Both
themes have continued to preoccupy him through-
out his photographic career.
Motivated both by his disillusionment with
photojournalism and his desire to move beyond
Robert Frank’s seminal bookThe Americans,in
the summer of 1959 Davidson turned to a group
of ‘‘troubled’’ youth in Brooklyn as a means of
making a new photographic statement. With the
help of a social worker, he contacted a gang of
teenagers who called themselves ‘‘the Jokers’’ and
whose ‘‘rumbles’’ frequently appeared in the news-
paper headlines. For 11 months, the gang members
agreed to let Davidson photograph their daily lives,
and the resulting images provide both an intimate
portrait of the teenagers as well as a probing exam-
ination of the restlessness and alienation of youth
culture in 1950s America. Davidson explains:
What I was photographing was not the gang, but a sense
of isolation and tensions within teenagers.... I never felt a
separation between myself and what I was photograph-
ing because I was really down to the feeling. But that
doesn’t mean that I didn’t feel guilty because I could go
home to a motel and they were sleeping on the ground. I
just never felt apart. With the gang, I was in the same
mood as they were.
(Livingston 330)
Born in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, in 1933
to a Jewish family of Polish origins, Davidson
developed an early interest in photography; he
owned a Brownie camera and had a rudimentary
darkroom set up by the age of ten. In high school,
he continued to involve himself with photogra-
phy, working weekends and summers as a stock
boy in a camera shop and later as an apprentice to
a commercial photographer. In 1951, Davidson
entered Rochester Institute of Technology where
he studied under Ralph Hattersley. In 1955, he
decided to pursue graduate studies at Yale Uni-
versity, studying philosophy, painting, and
photography under graphic designer Herbert
Matter, photographer and designer Alexey Bro-
dovitch, and painter Josef Albers. A class project
at Yale led to his first publication inLife,‘‘Ten-
sion in the Dressing Room,’’ which Davidson
photographed at one of the Yale football games
and submitted to the editors atLife. The photo-
essay appeared in the October 31, 1955 issue.
After one semester at Yale, the U.S. Army posted
Davidson to Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers
in Europe, just outside Paris. Working as a photo-
grapher for the army gave Davidson the opportunity
to spend many weekends in Paris, and he soon
befriended the widow of the impressionist painter
Leon Fauche ́, a contemporary of Paul Gauguin,
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Pierre-Auguste
Renoir. For this project, Davidson devoted weekend
after weekend photographing Madame Fauche ́
while she walked to the market or sat in her garret
surrounded by her husband’s paintings. The images
became the subject of his second photographic essay
entitled ‘‘The Widow of Montmartre,’’ published in
Esquirein 1958. In Paris, Davidson also met Henri
Cartier-Bresson whose work he had been introduced
to while at Rochester and who would become not
only his mentor but also a personal friend.
In 1957, the army discharged Davidson and he
returned to New York to begin working as a free-
lance photographer for Life. In 1958, Magnum
Photos offered him an associate membership and a
year later he became a full member. He liked the open
atmosphere of Magnum much better than the maga-
zine industry, and, in 1961, he accepted an assign-
ment given to him through Magnum byThe New
York Timesto cover the Freedom Riders in the
South. As a result of this job, Davidson began a
documentary project on the Civil Rights movement,
and, in 1962, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship
to assist him with his work. John Szarkowski at the
Museum of Modern Art included photographs from
the project in a 1966 one-man exhibition, and they
were also included inThe Negro American(1966), aDAVIDSON, BRUCE