Bruce Davidson: Subway

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When you travel to foreign places (doesn’t necessarily have to be out of your city), it is always good to figure out some of the important local customs and to even go out shooting with someone from the local area. Like Walker Evans before him, Davidson found a whole universe within the New York subway system. From criminals and cops, to half-naked vagrants, to macho youths, tired commuters, and windblown women, Davidson captures a spectrum of New Yorkers. Each image is arresting unto itself, and when taken as a whole, the series functions as a revelatory time capsule. In an interview at the strand bookstore, he is given a question about cameras (especially the proliferation of the iPhone as a camera). Davidson responds:

Gary Sampson of the Cleveland Institute of Art lists Davidson alongside Danny Lyon and Diane Arbus as photographers who reacted to Robert Frank’s European perspective in The Americans with a ‘hip’ ‘insider’ investigation of U.S. subcultures pervaded by a sombre angst. He points to Nathan Lyons' characterisation of this trend as ‘social landscape’ [43] in Lyon's curation of the 1966 George Eastman House Toward a Social Landscape. [44] The term "social landscape" was coined in 1963 by Lee Friedlander to describe his photographs, and was subsequently attached to the work of Davidson, Lyon, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Duane Michals; a hybrid term, it refers to a fusion of traditional documentary and landscape photography in which subject and environment are inseparable, and which calls attention to apparently inconsequential events and details so that object and setting modify each other to generate metaphor. [45] It’s pretty much always my practice to offer pictures. Even in the Brooklyn gang I would give them pictures. It was a way of seeing them, and a way of them seeing me. So I was able to be invisible almost to them- because they were secure with them being around me. They were very depressed, angry, and poor- and nothing for them in that community. I wasn’t there to judge them, it was about these kids – any kids- unattended to”. Die Aufbewahrungsfrist hängt von der Art der gespeicherten Daten ab. Jeder Kunde kann festlegen, wie lange Google Analytics Daten aufbewahrt, bevor sie automatisch gelöscht werden. Davidson shares another story of a photograph of a woman he took in Central Park with her two dogs. Rather than taking the photograph outright he eased his way into the situation and built her trust:

East 100th Street

International Center of Photography; Handy, Ellen, 1961– (1999), Reflections in a glass eye: works from the International Center of Photography collection (1sted.), Little, Brown and Company; New York: in association with the International Center of Photography, ISBN 978-0-8212-2625-4 {{ citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list ( link) Bruce Davidson: Outsider on the Inside is organized by Benjamin Mendez, Exhibitions and Archives Fellow 2019 – 2020. Audio tour and interpretation by Amy Raffel, Ph.D., Andrew W. Mellon Interpretation Fellow. Bruce Davidson: La Nature de Paris, Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris, June 13, 2007 – Sept 30, 2007 [66] What carries me on is the next thing. I’m working in Los Angeles and imp very interested in plant and animal life overlooking the city. It is very difficult to photograph that, but I’m doing that. It’s expensive, they don’t have a subway yet in Los Angeles. So that challenge and that truth comes out of doing it everyday. Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m doing – in Los Angeles I’m not sure what’s its all about- but its very interesting to me.”

It is a great social equalizer… From the moving train above the ground, we see glimpses of the city, and as the train moves into the tunnels, sterile fluorescent light reaches into the stony gloom and we, trapped inside, all hang on together, Bruce Davidson – Subway, 1980 Conclusion Davidson must surely have been aware of Walker Evans's own series of subway photographs, which the older photographer began taking in 1938 but did not publish until 1966, in a volume entitled Many Are Called. Once again to clarify, Davidson doesn’t like to categorize his type of photography, and would certainly disagree with calling himself a “street photographer”. However I feel out of all the photographers out there, he has had one of the strongest impacts on my photography in terms of his humanitarianism, interest in social issues, as well as his love and compassion for his subjects.Support for this exhibition is provided by an anonymous donor, the members of The San Diego Museum of Art, and the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Program. Institutional support for the Museum is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture. Doty, Robert M; Doty, Robert M; Whitney Museum of American Art (1974), Photography in America, Ridge Press; London: Thames and Hudson, ISBN 978-0-500-54024-4 The subway interior was defaced with a secret handwriting that covered the walls, windows, and maps. I began to imagine that these signatures surrounding the passengers were ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Every now and then when I was looking at one of these cryptic messages, someone would come and sit in front of it, and I would feel as if the message had been decoded. I started to draw a connection between the Broadway Island, the neighborhood cafeteria and the pious scribe on the Lower East Side. The connection was the subway.” 6. How Davidson prepared himself for the “Subway” project: Davidson shares from his “Subway” project in which he would wander around the subways without a particular destination in mind:

In this third publication, a sequence of 118 images (including twenty-five never-before-published photographs) moves the viewer through a landscape sometimes menacing, at other times lyrical, soulful, and satiric.To prepare for myself for the subway, I started a crash diet, a military fitness exercise program, an early every morning I jogged in the park. I knew I would need to train like an athlete to be physically able to carry my heavy camera equipment around in the subway for hours every day. Also, I thought that if anything was going to happen to me down there I wanted to be in good shape, or at least to believe that I was.” From 1961 to 1965, Davidson produced one of his most famous bodies of work, “Time of Change” in which he followed the Civil Rights Movement and Freedom Riders around the United States, in both the North and South. This project awarded him the first National Endowment for the Arts grant ever given to a photographer. Davidson’s portraits deliver a unique insight into the situations of the underground community. The Subway photographs are valuable for the sake of posterity as much as it is the work of art. It is a document that proves the conditions of the day. Each photograph in the Subway series captures a rare, short-lived moment in time within the history of socialization in the United States. The Guardian Angels, for example, are unique to just a short period of the history of the city of New York.

In 1998, Davidson returned to East 100th Street to document the revitalization, renewal and changes that occurred in the 30 years since he last documented it. For this visit, he presented a community slide show and received an Open Society Institute Individual Fellowship Award. Turner, Peter; Barbican Art Gallery (1985), American images: photography 1945–1980, New York: Viking Penguin, ISBN 978-0-670-80619-5Davidson also shares his difficulties & struggles when working on a long-term project, especially in his “Subway” project: a b c d e f Warren, Lynne; Warren, Lynn (2005), Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, Taylor and Francis, ISBN 978-0-203-94338-0