Bruce Davidson SUBWAY Portfolio

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BRUCE DAVIDSON SUBWAY

Subway is the first major body of color work by legendary Magnum photographer, Bruce Davidson. Color is essential to the scenes depicted. The faces, metal, graffiti, the moist skin would be shortchanged in black and white. Even the darkness is color darkness. In the late 1970s and early 1980s a few major exhibitions introduced color to great numbers of artist photographers. Droll observations by William Eggleston, and urban work by Helen Levitt, Joel Meyerowitz, and Stephen Shore, as well as several vigorous manifestations on the West Coast started a powerful dialogue about color photography. Subway was an early and forceful statement about the possibilities in documentary vision. The impact on other photographers was profound. These large, bold and beautiful color images extracted directly from a world that was decidedly not beautiful were among the first to show us that contradiction. – Arthur Ollman


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Bruce Davidson

Subway Portfolio, 2006 50.8 x 60.69 cm inch Dye Transfer Prints

Signed in pencil by the artist on verso A portfolio of forty-‐seven (50.8 x 60.69 cm) dye transfer prints in a custom clamshell box

Printed by Guy Stricherz at CVI Laboratory, 2006 From a limited edition of six with three artist proofs

$350,000.


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BRUCE DAVIDSON Bruce Davidson began photography at the age of ten in Oak Park, Illinois. 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, one of the four founders of the renowned international co-‐operative photography agency, Magnum Photos. 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 the “Freedom Rides”. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 to photograph what became a profound documentation of the Civil Rights Movement in America. In 1963 the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his early work in a solo show. In 1966 he was awarded the first grant for photography form 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 published by Harvard University Press in 1970 under the title East 100th Street and was later republished and expanded by St. Ann’s Press. The work became an exhibition that same year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 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. In 1992 he photographed the landscape and layers of life of Central Park. Bruce Davidson is a 1998 recipient of an Open Society Institute Individual Fellowship to return to East 100th Street and was awarded the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Photography. Classic bodies of work from his 50-‐year career have been extensively published in monographs and are included in many major public and private fine art collections around the world. He continues to photograph and produce new bodies of work.

Bruce Davidson SUBWAY Portfolio

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