Bruce Davidson Biography

Bruce Davidson began photography as a boy at the age of ten. While attending Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University he continued to further his knowledge and develop his passion. He was later drafted into the army and stationed near Paris where he met Henri Cartier-Bresson. When he left military service in 1957, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for Life Magazine and in 1958 became a full member of Magnum Photos. From 1958 to 1961 he created such seminal bodies of work as 'The Dwarf', 'Brooklyn Gang', and 'Freedom Rides'. In 1962 Davidson received a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph what became a profound documentation of the American Civil Rights Movement, the highly acclaimed work known as Time of Change. In 1966 he was awarded the first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts, having spent two years bearing witness to the dire social conditions on one block in East Harlem. This work was first published by Harvard University Press in 1970, under the title East 100^th Street. In 1980 he captured the vitality of the New York Metro's underworld that was later published in his book Subway and exhibited at the International Center for Photography in 1982. Other series include 'Central Park', 'Circus', 'Scotland/England', 'The Nature of LA', and more.