Bruce Davidson: Subway

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Davidson learned technical nuances of photography from Al Cox, including lighting, printing, and dye transfer color. He spent a year photographing the New York subway system using Kodachrome 64 film in a Canon 35mm camera. This edition adds forty unseen images to the original book, and includes a new introduction by Arthur Ollman of the Museum of Photographic Art in San Diego, and a foreword by Fred Braithwaite (aka Fab Five Freddy), the original graffiti artist. This helped perpetuate a certain stereotype among the community, which stills exists in the hearts and minds of some people to this day.

Few contemporary photographers give us their observation so unembellished – so free of apparent craft or artifice – as does Bruce Davidson. His naked prose, together with his compelling images, evoke the speeding sensation of a subway car, tunneling out of the darkness into a new light and unmistakable beauty. With cloth portfolio containing color dye transfer print measuring 6 3/4 x 9 3/4 inches, signed and editioned in pencil by the photographer on verso.Institutional support for the Museum is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture. In his work, formal and technical concerns remain below the surface, all but invisible of the life that is described, scarcely changed by its transmutation into art. In 1980, after living in New York City for 23 years, Davidson began Subway, his startling color essay of urban life.

The prints were issued in an un-numbered Limited Edition (limited to the number of prints purchased during the days in which the sale was open to the public). He became a member of Magnum Photos in 1958, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1967 and 1980, the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Photography in 2004, and a Gold Medal of Honor Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Arts Club in 2007. Color photography was not new for me – most of my commissioned work and all of my films have been done in color. He also carried quarters in his pockets to hand out to the people in the subways who often ask for money. In Davidson's own words, "the people in the subway, their flesh juxtaposed against the graffiti, the penetrating effect of the strobe light itself, and even the hollow darkness of the tunnels, inspired an aesthetic that goes unnoticed by passengers who are trapped underground, hiding behind masks and closed off from each other.After completing his military service, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer and even became an associate member of the Magnum Photos agency in 1958 and a year later, a full member. As I went down the subway stairs, through the turnstile, and onto the darkened station platform, a sinking sense of fear gripped me. In 1986, Aperture first published Bruce Davidson’s Subway – a ground-breaking series that has garnered critical acclaim both as a document of a unique moment in the cultural fabric of New York City as well as for its phenomenal use of extremes of color and shadow set against flash-lit skin.