Bruce Davidson

Description

Over the course of his long career Bruce Davidson has travelled the world making reportage stories both on assignment as a member of the Magnum agency and on subjects of personal interest. A few years ago he returned to his archive of negatives housed in a room in his Manhattan apartment and began a ritual of revisiting each and every one of the stories he had made, from his work as a student in 1954 to his urban landscapes in Los Angeles in 2009. Printing in his darkroom alongside the archive, he began to elaborate a very personal selection, discovering forgotten images and throwing new light onto some of his most famous series. Outside Inside is the result of this work, a sumptuous three volume box set with fifty-three chapters over 800 pages. Each chapter is introduced by a short text written by Davidson himself. The result is a celebration of the development of a master of the medium and an autobiography, a photographer’s life seen through his work. Bruce Davidson began taking pictures at the age of ten in Oak Park, Illinois. He continued to further his exploration of photography at Rochester Institute of Technology, followed by Yale University. He was later drafted into the military, stationed in the Arizona desert and then sent to a unit near Paris, where he met Henri Cartier-Bresson. When he left military service in 1957, Davidson freelanced for LIFE, and in 1958 he became a member of Magnum. His numerous awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1962) and the first National Endowment for the Arts in Photography (1967). His work has been extensively published and included in many major fine art collections. Most recently, Steidl published England/Scotland 1960 and Circus.