Image of the Day

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Bruce Davidson, London 1960. Girl Holding Kitten.

For no reason, except that I love this photograph, and every time I look at it I think of a friend.

Davidson in The Guardian's series My Best Shot (wherein photographers describe how they got their favorite photo):

In 1960, I purchased a Hillman Minx convertible, which wasn't a very expensive car in those days, and drove around England with the top down. It was an American-drive car, which was an advantage because I could snap people on the sidewalk more easily. I also had a sports coat made with the side pockets larger, so I could fit my Leicas in them.

I found this young woman quite by accident, as I was walking the London streets. I came upon a group of teenagers, and struck up a conversation. They took me into a cave, and then some kind of huge dancehall. I think it was on an island. It was getting late, and I needed to move on the next morning, so I didn't stay very long.

But I isolated this girl to photograph, holding that kitten, which was probably a stray she had found on the street, and carrying that bedroll wrapped around her body. There was a great deal of mystery to her. I didn't know where she had come from, and I didn't get her name, but there was something about that face - the hopefulness, positivity and openness to life - it was the new face of Britain.

Metropolitan Transit Authority

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Images from Bruce Davidson's classic Subway series, first published in 1986.

The book has recently been re-released with 25 previously unpublished images, and next Wednesday night at Aperture Gallery in New York, Davidson will be discussing his work and signing copies of Subway.


Click here for info.

Image of the Day

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LA [Man at Drive In Diner], 1964, from Five Decades, an exhibition of photographs by Bruce Davidson on view today through December 19th at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York. The show is running simultaneously with another Bruce Davidson exhibition, at Howard Greenberg.

Outside/Inside, a three-volume book containing over 800 of Davidson's photographs from the past fifty years, is forthcoming from Steidl.

Image of the Day

. Couple by Jukebox in Social Club, 1966 – a photograph by Bruce Davidson, from his East 100th Street series. In 1967 and '68, Davidson extensively photographed the residents and environs of one particular block of Spanish Harlem which had a reputation for being one of the worst in the city, but was actively being improved by the block's residents. The photographs were exhibited in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art in a groundbreaking show; curator John Szarkowski wrote that Davidson had "shown us true and specific people, photographed in these private moments of suspended action in which the complexity and ambiguity of individual lives triumph over abstraction." Davidson gave prints of his photographs to hundreds of residents of the block, and many of them attended the opening at MoMA.

The exact prints from that exhibition are on view today through January 2nd, 2010, at Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York. [Many of the photographs were also shown in 2003 at Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle.]

A simultaneous exhibition of Bruce Davidson's photography opens tomorrow at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery.

"I'm Kind of Nosy That Way"

"My impulse was to explore...to explore...and to find myself through exploration."—Bruce Davidson

I often turn WNYC off and switch to podcasts or music when the Leonard Lopate show rolls around at noon—but today he did a great interview with the distinguished Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson, in which he discusses his outlook on street photography. (As a side point, I find it interesting that like Lee Friedlander, Davidson has made a transition from photographing people to photographing plants. In general I'm not that interested in photographs of plants but maybe that happens later.)

Click here to listen and check out Davidson's portfolio at Art Department.