Bruce Davidson: Subway

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Davidson took snaps of lonely windows, vagrant winos, and solemn old men sitting on the benches on concrete islands of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Só nao ganhou cinco estrelas porque tem algumas fotos que são "normais", e poderiam ter ficado tranquilamente de fora da obra. His variety of experiences are palpable in the pages of Subway; through Davidson’s photographs we are taken on a visceral journey through this vast network of darkened tunnels, vandalized platforms and eerie carriages. His mornings started with him packing his cameras, strobe light, lenses, filters, and accessories in a small canvas bag. Few contemporary photographers give us their observation so unembellished – so free of apparent craft or artifice – as does Bruce Davidson.He spent five years photographing the civil rights movement in America, following a group of freedom riders in the south (in 1961) through dangerous situations. His glowing skin tone seemed to match the chains around his neck, which James Agee would often refer to as ‘badges of being.

Still, within it, the photographer communicates an increasingly widespread sense of solidarity between the inhabitants of the subterranean – there is harmony within the underground malaise. Each photograph in the Subway series captures a rare, short-lived moment in time within the history of socialization in the United States. Davidson also brought several rolls of film, a notebook, a subway map, and a wedding album containing photos of the people he had already photographed in the subway. A woman named Kathy, staring at herself in a cigarette machine in one of his most famous photographs, shot herself with a shotgun. From the moving train above ground, we see glimpses of the city, and as the trains move into the tunnels, sterile fluorescent light reaches into the stony gloom, and we, trapped inside, all hang on together.After military service, in 1957, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for Life Magazine and in 1958 became a full member of Magnum Photos. Subway is Davidson's visceral take on the New York underground system of the 1980s complete with beleagured passengers, Guardian Angels, graffiti and a palpable, all-pervasive sense of fear. Davidson continues to create classic bodies of work from his 50-year career that have been extensively published in monographs and are included in all the major public and private fine art collections around the world. In Davidson's own words, the people in the subway, their flesh juxtaposed against the graffiti, the penetrating effect of the strobe light itself, and even the hollow darkness of the tunnels, inspired an aesthetic that goes unnoticed by passengers who are trapped underground, hiding behind masks and closed off from each other.

He also carried quarters in his pockets to hand out to the people in the subways who often ask for money. Bruce Davidson s Subway has become iconic for its juxtaposition of humanity against urban machinery. Celebrating a recent gift from the collection of Wanda and Cam Garner, this exhibition presents a range of colorful, visceral, and surprisingly intimate portraits of passengers taken during a notoriously dangerous time in New York City.

This work was published by Harvard University Press in 1970 under the title East 100th Street and was later republished and expanded by St. After completing his military service, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer and even became an associate member of the Magnum Photos agency in 1958 and a year later, a full member. Steadily deteriorating ever since the opening of the first underground line in 1904, by the time Davidson embarked on his project in the spring of 1980, the subway had reached its lowest ebb. In his work, formal and technical concerns remain below the surface, all but invisible of the life that is described, scarcely changed by its transmutation into art. He familiarized himself with a smaller area, and used that to tell a much larger story, due to the intimacy with his subjects.