davidson

Bruce Davidson is one of America’s most respected and influential documentary photographers. His love of photography began at the age of ten in Oak Park, Illinois. In 1947, at the age of 16, he won his first prize in the Kodak National High School Competition. He went on to attend The Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University. After military service in 1957 he worked as a freelance photographer for Life Magazine, and in 1958 he became a member of Magnum Photos, the International photography agency.

Davidson continued to photograph extensively from 1958 to 1965, creating such bodies of work as “The Dwarf”, “Brooklyn Gang” and “The Civil Rights Movement”. He received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 to document youth in the South during the Civil Rights movement. The work included images from the cities of Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama, as well as the earlier Freedom Ride photographs. In 1963, the Museum Of Modern Art in New York included these historically important images, among others, in a “one man” exhibition.

Bruce Davidson’s photographs have been described as “extraordinary for the depth of their feeling and their poetic mood”. In 1966 Davidson was awarded the first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts, and spent two years documenting one block in East Harlem. Harvard University Press published this work in 1970 under the title “East 100th Street”. The work became a solo exhibition that same year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Davidson received a second National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1980, and he was a recipient of an Open Society Institute Individual Fellowship in 1998. His photographs have been shown in some of the finest museums and institutions in the world. These include: International Center of Photography, New York; The Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis; the Museum de Tokyo, Paris, France; the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; the Museum Rattu, Arles, France; the Burden Gallery, New York; the Parco Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; and the New York Historical Society, New York.

Davidson continues to work as an editorial and documentary photographer and his work appears regularly in publications all over the globe. He lives in New York with his wife and has two daughters.

Soulcatcher Studio would like to thank Robin Hurley of St. Ann’s Press
for providing much of the information contained in this biography.