Bruce Davidson
The Magnum veteran’s pioneering documentary work has highlighted the lives of people marginalised by mainstream society. He talks to David Clark about his extraordinary 60-year career
The Magnum veteran opens up about his remarkable 60-year documentary career
When did you begin taking photographs? I started photography at the age of 10. Later, when I was 14 or 15 and I had a good camera, I could go off by myself on little explorations until dark. There was a flea market in Chicago that was very exotic to me. That was really heaven and I had a good time photographing it. I also had a job at a local camera store, where I dusted off cameras which I drooled over and wanted to have one day.
How did you develop your photographic knowledge?
I was very fortunate because there was a commercial photographer named Mr Cox, who came into the store where I worked, and he took me under his wing.
I would hang out at his studio and watch him make dye transfer prints, or go with him on a photo shoot for the local paper. If my mother needed to reach me, I would invariably be with Mr. Cox. He was one of those old Southern gentlemen: he smoked a cigar to the very end, and could do anything. He sort of became my mentor, and it was very good I had that early experience.
What was your big break in professional photography?
I studied graphic design at Yale University; for my thesis, I chose to photograph the university’s football team. I didn’t photograph the players on the field – only the tension, pain and mood in the locker room before or after the game. I never saw the game itself. Life published those photos. I was around 20 years old, which was kind of unusual.
You met Henri Cartier-Bresson in France in 1956. Was he a big influence on your work?
Oh yeah, I tried to be a little CartierBresson. I got interested in his work when I was at Rochester Institute of Technology. There were 140 students, and only two of them were women. I took a fancy to one of them and she showed me Cartier-Bresson’s book The Decisive
Moment. She said she was in love with him. So I thought, “I’ll take pictures like him, and she will be in love with me.”
So I imitated his work. I bought a very used Leica, and went around the streets making ‘decisive moments’ to impress the young lady. But the truth of the matter is that she ran off with the English professor, and I got stuck with CartierBresson. That was the pain and pleasure of life. In the early 1960s my work was
Cartier-Bresson-ish, but later it got harder and sharper.
You’ve always worked on long-term projects, sometimes over a number of years. Why?
I always look at life as a series of happenings, a series of dramas. My work has been an evolution of one photographic image being in the same field as another, and together they have a cumulative effect. So they’re all my children and they’re almost all equally important. It’s really like a family of imagery: some members of the family are interesting at a certain point, while at other times they might not be so interesting. There’s always a discovery to be made in any given group of pictures.
What made you choose the subjects you’ve photographed?
I learned from one body of work to another. For instance, during a five-year period I photographed many of the marches and demonstrations that took place during the civil rights movement in America. I have traditional photos of the
marchers passing by, but I also have pictures of individual people, which is a whole body of work in itself.
If I hadn’t experienced and learned from the civil rights movement over several years, I wouldn’t have been able to sensitively photograph the turmoil in the lives of people living on one block in East Harlem for East 100th Street. I would have been blind to its poverty and also its possibilities.
What effect did East 100th Street have after its release?
That body of work, which I presented in 1970 at MoMA in New York, became a calling card for the residents. The citizens’ committee was able to take that book and show it to the mayor to help fund renovations in an under-served community. So those photographs had a use beyond the aesthetic part.
What would you say your subjects have in common?
Every body of work I’ve done has a certain social dynamic; not that they’re political, I’m not a political... Well I am, everybody’s political. You wake up in the morning and have a cup of coffee, and it’s a political statement. I just go along with the thought of how I can help people through my photographs – and I don’t put too much sugar on it. It’s all very interesting and it’s a way of life for me.
Brooklyn Gang, your 1959 work, focuses on a gang called The Jokers. How did you get to know them?
A tabloid newspaper had showed pictures of some kids who had been beaten up to some extent by a rival gang. These were depressed kids; they didn’t take drugs or have machine guns like the gangs today,
“I just go along with the thought of how I can help people through my photographs – and I don’t put too much sugar on it”
but they were still violent. I took pictures of their wounds for them, to show the lawyers, then I went back the next day and gave them the pictures. I kept my mouth shut and observed them. There was so much pain and loss. There was nothing for them in that community. Anyway, I got to know them and photographed them over a period of time.
Is the printing process an important part of your work?
It was until recently, but I don’t think I have the endurance right now.
The last time that I printed in the darkroom was about a year ago. But I have a very fine printer, and he’s actually a better printer than I am.
Why are there so few people in your recent bodies of work, Nature of
Paris and Nature of Los Angeles?
With Paris, we researched and found beautiful parks. That was enough, Paris is so lovely, and those pictures have a strong presence. The Los Angeles pictures are dramatic without people.
To be honest, I was kind of relieved to not have to make contact with anyone. I needed that rest. I might go back to photographing people, but at that time I needed a new challenge. The Hollywood hills became my subject. Cacti and palm trees cheered me on. Sometimes you just have to have fun.
What advice would you give someone who wants to shoot the kind of work you’ve done?
You need to have passion and purpose as a photographer. A good example is my youngest daughter, Anna Mia Davidson.
When she was 25 she went to Cuba and fell in love with it. During the following 10 years, she saved every penny she could to get back there to take photographs. When it was done, a beautiful book of her Cuba photos was published by Steidl. I think if you have the concern and the patience, as well as the focus and energy, and are willing to confront life as it is, you’ll find something.
Does looking back at your lifetime’s body of work give you a sense of satisfaction?
When you have 60 years’ worth of photography, that’s a lot of stuff. Fortunately I have the support of everybody around me, helping me sort it out. And I’ve been lucky that I’ve had a bright, beautiful wife to help me get through it all. But I can’t lean back on my couch and say I’ve done it. I’m still trying to get to the top of the mountain.
What’s been the driving force behind your photography? To understand the world, or to change it?
It could be both; it could be everything in a given moment. I have to keep going on to find out what’s around the next corner. Photography’s always been in my veins. The passion for photographing a subject has stayed with me all these years and it still continues.