Image: Bruce Davidson, American, born 1933
Two Women at Lunch Counter, New York, 1962
From the series Time of Change
June 2 – September 2, 2025
Atrium Gallery, Jane Lutnick Fine Arts Center
Opening: May 30, 2025, 3:00 to 4:30 p.m.
Summer Hours:
June 2 to September 2, 2025
Monday–Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Winter Hours:
September 3 – December 6, 2025
Monday–Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Weekends, noon to 6:00 p.m.
Bruce Davidson was born on September 5, 1933 in Oak Park, Illinois, and studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York from 1951 to 1954, and Graphic Design at the School of Art, Yale University in 1955.
During military service in Paris, Davidson met Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the founders of Magnum Photos, and in 1958 became a full member. He worked as a freelance photographer for Life from 1958 to 1961. Davidson created such seminal bodies of work as Circus, Brooklyn Gang, and Freedom Riders. During this period of professional growth, the late Henry Geldzahler, former Curator of Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, said of this work, “The ability to enter so sympathetically into what seems superficially an alien environment remains Bruce Davidson’s sustained triumph; in his investigation he becomes the friendly recorder of tenderness and tragedy.”
This survey of thirty-six of Bruce Davidson’s seminal black and white silver gelatin photographic prints is supplemented with works by Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, August Sander, and Lewis Hine for comparison and contrast purposes and to demonstrate Davidson’s historical connection and affinity with these photographers’ works. Davidson’s photographs were produced in the mid-twentieth century as cultural phenomena like big top tent circuses in America were dying out, and as profound social and political changes were being ushered in by the civil rights movement. These changes were to affect American society for generations to come.
In a 2015 interview, with critic Arthur Lubow, Davidson named some photographers he thought had taken the medium to “a new departure point”: Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus. Frank, who was probably Davidson’s greatest stylistic influence, sought to portray scenes and people new to him. Davidson, on the other hand, spent months or years getting so close to what is portrayed in his photograph that it is seen and felt by the viewer as an insider would have experienced it.
The photographer received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 to document the American civil rights movement, later published as Time of Change. In 1963, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his early work in a solo exhibition. The first photography grant from the National Endowment for the Arts was awarded to Davidson in 1967. He spent two years witnessing the dire social conditions on one block in East Harlem, New York City. The resulting book, East 100th Street, was published by Harvard University Press in 1970. This work became an exhibition that same year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by John Szarkowski.
Danny Lyons’ photograph, Greenwood, Mississippi, is a photo of Bob Dylan performing at a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Freedom Concert on July 6, 1963. It provides insight into a song that was to define an era and Davidson’s photographs. A few months after the concert in Mississippi, Dylan composed The Times They Are a-Changin in September of that same year. The song and the album with the same name were released in 1964 by Columbia Records and became an anthem of change. The song, like Bruce Davidson’s photographs, is humanistic art of the highest order.
Davidson’s photographs are documents of grand and intimate moments of history from 1958 to 1992 and like Dylan’s song have become essential for an appreciation of what was lost and what was gained as we approach the end to the first quarter of the 21st century.
