Bruce Davidson’s influence looms large in the world of American photography. In 1958, he was the youngest photographer to be invited by Henri Cartier-Bresson to join the cooperative photography agency Magnum — with which he remains affiliated to this day, at the age of 81 — and his powerful work shows him to have been present to document an array of seminal events in American history, capturing thousands of subjects with his lens.
Davidson’s numerous celebrated series of photos, such as “Brooklyn Gang” (1959); “Freedom Riders” and “Time of Change” from the civil rights movement; and “Subway” (1980), reveal deeply contained truths about American culture and Americans themselves, in the tradition of better-known greats such as Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander. An exhibition of his work currently on view at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, however, focuses on a distant location.
“Bruce Davidson/Paul Caponigro: Two American Photographers in Britain and Ireland,” co-organized by the Yale Center for British Art, (huntington.org/davidsoncaponigro) includes approximately 150 photographs by the two photographers, who were born one year apart. Boston native Caponigro’s style is more closely aligned with formalism and has an ethereal quality grounded in nature and connected to the artist’s own spiritual quests. Davidson’s U.K. and Ireland work, which began as a two-month assignment from the British magazine The Queen, pulses with an immediacy and engagement with his subjects that’s only somewhat tempered by journalistic distance.
Raised in Oak Park, Ill., a Chicago suburb, Davidson’s interest in photography began when he was just 10. He was the first in his family to become a bar mitzvah, for which he received an Argus A2 camera as a gift. Speaking by phone from Manhattan, where he’s been based since the 1950s, he described his family’s trajectory in Chicago as “an ordinary good-luck story,” one that was largely secular. “We weren’t terribly observant. My grandfather came over from Russia at the age of 14 and taught himself English. He was an expert tailor, and his brother had a business,” he noted.
Bruce Davidson, Wales, 1965, gelatin silver print, 8 3/8 by 12 1/2 inches, Yale Center for British Art Courtesy of Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos
As a student, Davidson was more interested in pursuing his creative passion than in academics, and he eventually enrolled at the Rochester Institute of Technology, even then an important center of photographic learning. He then went to Yale for one semester, where he studied color theory with the famed Bauhaus-trained artist and educator Josef Albers. Davidson’s photographs of the Yale football team were published in Life magazine in 1955. He was then drafted into the military and stationed near Paris, which is where he met Cartier-Bresson.
Like Cartier-Bresson, Davidson is affiliated with the school of observational urban street photography, and he described his own work as “going into a world within a world. I’m open to things that draw me close to the situations, like the Freedom Rides and the civil rights movement. I took whatever I saw and observed and felt and understood, and whatever reached me.”
His portfolio also contains a trove of celebrity portraits that he shot for major media outlets. That included many years’ worth of photographs he took in New York’s Lower East Side, starting in 1957. “My first color pictures are of the Lower East Side pushcarts,” Davidson said. (An exhibition of Davidson’s work in color is on view through Dec. 5 at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in Manhattan.)
Davidson would come back to the neighborhood to work with his friend Isaac Bashevis Singer, and the two collaborated on a short film in 1973, “Isaac Singer’s Nightmare and Mrs. Pupko’s Beard.” He sought to capture a “climate that existed, and remnants of the old Jewish neighborhoods in New York,” which, given demographic changes in that city, are now virtually unrecognizable to many longtime residents. “I felt very close to it because those are my people,” Davidson said of the project. Decades later, he spent a month shooting for Esquire magazine at Katz’s Delicatessen after the tragedy of 9/11, thinking about “peace and pastrami” and recording how people responded to that event in a specific time and place.
Given that Davidson told The New Yorker in 2012, “I love gloom,” his affinity for the countries featured in the Huntington exhibition comes as no surprise. “But now it’s changing for me. The light in L.A. is extraordinary,” he explained. His relationship with photographing Los Angeles began with an Esquire magazine assignment in 1964, and Davidson has refocused his attention here in recent years.
“I spent a number of weeks in the foothills,” he said, “photographing the wonderful relationship between the hills and the city grid below,” along with other details of the Southern California landscape, such as the contrast of trees and the built environment. These photos have been collected into the “Nature of Los Angeles” series. (The New Yorker’s subsequent repeated use of a particular Davidson image from the grouping prompted journalist Alissa Walker to joke on her blog, “I’m really worried about The New Yorker. Apparently the publication only owns this one photo of Los Angeles.”)
Perhaps being a Jewish American enhanced his perspective as a stranger in a strange land when photographing in England, Scotland and Ireland, as well as helped forge an empathic connection with people living on the margins, such as Irish carnival performers, burlesque dancers, street urchins and Welsh coal miners. To Davidson, however, the angle of identity politics doesn’t resonate.
“I wouldn’t call myself a ‘Jewish photographer.’ I’m just a photographer,” he said. “I might be a Jewish photographer when I’m having smoked salmon and a bagel and cream cheese, but I generally don’t think of myself as anything other than a human being.”
Given the many decades he has lived on the Upper West Side (in the same building where Singer resided), and that much of his career has explored the city’s complex culture, people and places, does he consider himself a New Yorker?
“Barbra Streisand’s a New Yorker. I’m not a New Yorker. I feel close to everybody,” he said.
For more information on “Bruce Davidson/Paul Caponigro: Two American Photographers in Britain and Ireland” at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, click here.
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