Bruce Davidson: An Illustrated Biography - Book Signing at Howard Greenberg Gallery

Bruce Davidson: An Illustrated Biography - Book Signing at Howard Greenberg Gallery

Please join us for a book signing with Bruce Davidson who will be at Howard Greenberg Gallery on Saturday, April 16 from 11 am to 1pm signing copies of the forthcoming book Bruce Davidson: An Illustrated Biography

 

Bruce Davidson: An Illustrated Biography

Magnum Legacy

Vicki Goldberg, with a foreword by Susan Meiselas and Andrew E. Lewin

 

192 pages with 175 illustrations, 52 in ­­­full-color

Hardcover with jacket

9 ¼ x 10 ¾ in.

ISBN: 978-3-7913-8135-0

Publication Date: May 2016

 

 

Published in association with the Magnum Foundation.

 

In 1943, ten-year-old Bruce Davidson was waiting his turn in a basketball game in an alley when a friend asked if he wanted to watch him “developing.” Entranced as an image began to swim up on the paper, young Bruce went home to ask his mother for a darkroom. She emptied out his grandmother’s jelly room in the basement, and he started spending all his free time there. His uncle later gave him an Argus A2 35mm, and from then on he roamed his Oak Park, Chicago neighborhood taking pictures non-stop. “Most boys my age had a dog,” he says “I had a camera.”

 

So began the career of one of the world’s most renowned photographers.  Davidson’s life and work is vibrantly captured in Bruce Davidson: An Illustrated Biography by Vicki Goldberg. The son of a hardworking divorced mother, he was a loner who disliked school and had difficulty conforming to the world around him. His camera released him from the boundaries of his youth and opened the doors to a lifetime’s work.

 

Goldberg's authoritative text explores the wide range of Davidson’s vision and technique, and reveals how his work has played a critical role in 20th-century photography while recognizing him as a truly American artist, iconoclast, and humanist.

 

The volume includes beautifully reproduced images from his signature series such as Brooklyn Gang, East 100th Street, Subway, and Time of Change: Civil Rights Photographs, along with never-before-seen archival material from Davidson’s private archive. Davidson’s photographs reveal his curiosity about, and empathy for, his subjects. Whether he is documenting circuses, gangs, East Harlem tenements, Jewish cafeterias, Welsh miners, or Central Park, Davidson imbues his work with an eye for narrative. Davidson’s work appeared in Life, Vogue, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, and Glamour as well as in numerous books. The one thing that all of his pictures have in common is they all tell stories—and he lets them speak for themselves.

 

Bruce Davidson: An Illustrated Biography captures the photographer’s complex childhood, his strong sense of empathy, and his unwavering bond to the elderly, the young, and people living on the fringe of society. Although he never sought to be identified as an artist, his strong composition and beautiful printing are as important to him as his subject matter, and Davidson has brought his documentary sensibility into the realm of art photography.

 

About the Author:

Vicki Goldberg is a photography critic who has written for numerous publications such as The New York Times and Vanity Fair. Her books include The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives, Light Matters, and The White House: The President’s Home in Photographs and History. She has received numerous awards for her work, including ICP’s Infinity Award for Writing.