World Photography Awards Outstanding Contribution Award: Bruce Davidson
Somerset House, London
Until 22nd May 2011

Photography is such a young art form that a handful of historically pivotal practitioners are actually still practising. One such is Bruce Davidson, who rose to prominence with Life magazine and the Magnum agency in the 1950s, and this show takes us on a whistle-stop tour of his long and illustrious career to date via nothing more than small black-and-white prints. While this means we are denied anything from the colour Subway book, the curatorial coherence provides a refreshing antidote to the enormous colour photographs which tend to dominate the modern gallery experience.

Davidson has said that he works “from the outside of lives to the inside of lives”, and his selection from Brooklyn Gang takes us from the toughs playing stickball in the street through to the intimate Bengie at luncheonette, Brooklyn 1959, a psychological thriller of an image charged with anger and depression. The 1958 pictures of Jimmy the circus dwarf betray a similar method, going from outside the big top to more private portraits of Jimmy eating and sleeping, a sad and poignant sequence demonstrating an uncanny photographic talent for conveying emotion.

Melancholy also pervades the 1960s East 100th Street project, possibly Davidson’s best known work. Nearly all of the photographs selected (the couple on the bed, the stern young woman, the girl with the caged bird) speak of desolation and deprivation. Even the touch of humour provided by dog’s head poking from underneath the old man’s bed is overwhelmed by sorrow. Davidson’s early 1970s New York Cafeteria pictures, some of whose subjects were survivors from World War II concentration camps, are at times equally affecting. In particular the doleful, ageing woman holding the old photograph of the young couple is nothing less than heartbreaking.

Not all of Davidson’s work is in-depth character study, and he was right in the thick of the action in the civil rights-era American South, photographing ordinary people and the tension in the air. There is also a remarkable image of Dr. King, the struggle’s leader, visibly weighed down by the tumult of events, in reality beyond his or anyone else’s control.

Significant craft and toil is required to produce work of this importance and standard. Davidson spent years on most of the projects on show here, usually working speculatively without a commission, and choosing completely different photographic approaches to suit each one. The results will continue to inspire photographers for a very long time to come.

(link)
Simon Bowcock
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