Overview

'I didn't want to be the unobserved observer. I wanted to be with my subjects face to face.' - Bruce Davidson Consisting solely of previously unpublished photographs, The Way Back is a deep dive through Bruce Davidson's 60-year career. The book chronologically presents photos made between 1957 and 1992, showcasing Davidson's exceptional versatility-from his earliest assignments to later seminal bodies of work including his year-long study of teenage members of a ""Brooklyn Gang"" (1959), his extensive coverage of the American Civil Rights Movement in ""Time of Change"" (1961-65), and his breakthrough portraits of the residents of a single block in Harlem in ""East 100th Street"" (1966-68). Series such as ""Subway"" (1980) and ""Central Park"" (1992) furthermore confirm Davidson as a quintessential chronicler of New York City. Regardless of his motif, what emerges through this retrospective is Davidson's overt sensibility and empathy for his subjects, his commitment to documenting them in depth over time, and to capturing their beliefs, communities and subcultures. Unlike his peers who photographed events that constituted history, Davidson focused on the people within these histories. Now, drawing near the end of his long career, Davidson offers this book as a parting look at his artistic passage, an elegiac goodbye as well as a requiem: evidence how his vision, experienced over decades, has shaped our understanding of the world.

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9783969992319

Table of Contents

Reviews

Davidson's previous monographs concentrate on a particular topic, whereas the common thread in 'The Way Back' is about the photographer's relationship to all of his subjects--and himself. It has an elegiac poignance that feels less like a final bow than it does a crackling re-discovery, and it stands on its own as a coherent vision.--Alex Belth ""Air Mail""

Author Information

Born in Chicago in 1933, Bruce Davidson began photographing at the age of ten in Oak Park, Illinois. Davidson studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University before being drafted into the army. After leaving military service in 1957, he freelanced for Life and in 1958 became a member of Magnum Photos. Davidson's solo exhibitions include those at the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the International Center of Photography and the Art Institute of Chicago, and his awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the first National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Photography. In 2011 he received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from the Corcoran College of Art and Design. Davidson's books at Steidl include Outside Inside (2010), Subway (2011), Black & White (2012), England / Scotland 1960 (2014), Los Angeles 1964 (2015) and Nature of Los Angeles 2008-2013 (2015).

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