Bruce Davidson: Subway

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Disrupting the closed off realm of riders who captured his eye was a central part of Davidson’s process: “if they said, ‘Yes’, it was yes; if they said, ‘No,’ then I knew it was no forever. The brilliant flash, combined with fluorescent lighting, intense colors and Davidson's probing vision, produced images that are dramatic and at times surreal. Yet, as is the paradox of New York itself, these photographs also highlight the isolation of individuals within this sea of passengers; in his words “ [people] who are trapped underground, hiding behind masks, and closed off from each other. His glowing skin tone seemed to match the chains around his neck, which James Agee would often refer to as ‘badges of being. In 1966 he was awarded the first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts, and spent two years bearing witness to the dire social conditions on one block in East Harlem.

We asked Davidson about his perspective on the work today and whether he thinks he would have been so drawn to the subject had it not been in such a state of disrepair: “[this] gave a tension and a purpose to my photographs,” he replied.

His mornings started with him packing his cameras, strobe light, lenses, filters, and accessories in a small canvas bag. full-pg illustrations in color, signed by Davidson on the half title, afterword by Henry Geldzahler; fine in original gray cloth, pictorial dust jacket. In this third edition of what is now a classic of photographic literature, a sequence of 118 (including 25 previously unpublished) images transport the viewer through a landscape at times menacing, and at other times lyrical and soulful.

Subway photography embodies an American classic, colorful, dark, and compelling epitome of America’s underground society as depicted through the imagery. I photographed the people I had known there, survivors from the war and the death camps who had clung together after the Holocaust to re-root themselves in this strange land. From 1958 to 1961 he created such seminal bodies of work as The Dwarf, Brooklyn Gang, and the Freedom Rides.

He began photographing the traffic islands lining up Broadway, which, according to him, have always fascinated him. Every now and then, when I was looking at one of these cryptic messages, someone would come and sit in front of it, and I would feel as if the message had been decoded. Thanks for your time to teach Iam learning to take some good photography and I understand being in that moment for that shot.