Bruce Davidson

Photographer Bruce Davidson grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, where he began taking photos at the age of ten. He attended the Rochester Institute of Technology to study photography and then Yale University to pursue graduate work in philosophy and visual arts. Drafted into the army in the 1950s, Davidson was stationed in Paris, where he met the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004). In 1958, after having worked as a staff photographer at Life, Davidson joined Magnum Photos, Cartier-Bresson’s cooperative photography agency. Davidson received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 to document the civil rights movement, culminating in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1963. Throughout his career, Davidson produced photo essays about civil rights and social injustice in the United States. In 1966, he was the recipient of the first photography grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, enabling him to spend two years photographing a single block in Spanish Harlem and to publish the images in East 100th Street (1970). He is also the author of several other photographic essays on American urban life, including Subway (1986). His iconic photographs of American life have been exhibited worldwide.