Bruce Davidson

"It was 1962 when I went down South to meet the Freedom Riders, who were in Montgomery, AL. These youths were planning a bus ride from Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi, in an act of defiance against segregation. In the morning I boarded the Trailways bus with the Freedom Riders. A long line of squad cars and National Guard troops with grim faces and fixed bayonets stood alongside. I knew that a previous bus was set on fire in Anniston, AL, and its Riders were badly beaten. The first Freedom Ride was without a police escort, guarding soldiers, or the press. This time a platoon of Guardsmen was deployed to protect the buses, and police cars followed. There was a solemn climate of apprehension as gunshots were rumored to be heard coming from the forest along the highway. Bands of rednecks were seen waving clenched fists outside the bus windows along the route" – Bruce Davidson, Afterword, Time of Change.

Bruce Davidson began photography at the age of ten in Oak Park, IL. He attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University. After military service, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for Life Magazine, and in 1958, became a member of Magnum Photos. He created such notable bodies of work as “The Dwarf”, “Brooklyn Gang”, and the “Freedom Rides”. Davidson received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 to photograph what became a documentation of the Civil Rights movement. In 1963 the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his work in a one-man show. In 1966 Davidson was awarded the first grant for photography from the National Endowment of the Arts, which began two years of work documenting one block in East Harlem, which was published by Harvard University Press in 1970 as East 100th Street. Davidson’s other notable publications include Subsistence USA; Bruce Davidson, Photographs; Subway; Central Park; and Brooklyn Gang. Internationally published and exhibited, Davidson exhibited Brooklyn Gang at the International Center of Photography in 1998.