Bruce Davidson: Subway

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He is best known for his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as New York City Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Davidson started playing at being a detective, channeling the idea in the subway that he was untouchable. Here, the enclosed world of the subway is a metaphor for New York itself, in all its frantic hustle and bustle its violence, its humanity and its hope. Thanks for your time to teach Iam learning to take some good photography and I understand being in that moment for that shot.

Support for this exhibition is provided by an anonymous donor, the members of The San Diego Museum of Art, and the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Program. In 1966 he was awarded the first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts, and spent two years bearing witness to the dire social conditions on one block in East Harlem. After military service, in 1957, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for Life Magazine and in 1958 became a full member of Magnum Photos. Speaking to us about how he views the project today, Davidson reiterates this sentiment: “I feel that there was a passion and a purpose to photographing in the subway. The subway was dangerous at any time of the day or night, and everyone who rode it knew this and was on guard at all times; a day didn’t go by without the newspapers reporting yet another hideous subway crime.spent a year traveling the tracks of New York City’s subway system, photographing a full spectrum of people on their rumbling and sometimes gritty journeys through the city.

His mornings started with him packing his cameras, strobe light, lenses, filters, and accessories in a small canvas bag.Institutional support for the Museum is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture. Yet, as is the paradox of New York itself, these photographs also highlight the isolation of individuals within this sea of passengers; in his words “ [people] who are trapped underground, hiding behind masks, and closed off from each other. His works have either featured or the subject of 14 exhibitions over 50 years at a single notable institution – the Museum Art in New York. An Introductory, How-To Guide for Beginners: Learn about the basics of street photography in this easy to digest guide.

In this edition of classic photographic literature, a sequence of 118 images move the viewer through a landscape at times menacing, and at other times lyrical, soulful, and satiric. Asked about his perspective on the subway as it exists now and how it has changed, Davidson replies: “Of course you have to be aware of not standing too close to the platform and things of that nature to avoid catastrophe.Davidson got his first assignment in 1961 to photograph high fashion for Vogue and the New York Times Freedom Riders in the south. In 1986, Aperture first published Bruce Davidson’s Subway – a ground-breaking series that has garnered critical acclaim both as a document of a unique moment in the cultural fabric of New York City as well as for its phenomenal use of extremes of color and shadow set against flash-lit skin. Davidson's first extensive series in color, his exploratoin into the dark grafitti-filled New York subway perfectly complements his portrayal of the everyday human condition. As I went down the subway stairs, through the turnstile, and on to the darkened station platform, a sense of fear gripped me. I began to imagine that these signatures surrounding the passengers were ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.