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Born in 1933, Oak Park, IL
Bruce Davidson began photography at the age of ten in Oak Park, Illinois. In 1949, at the age of 16, he won his first prize in the Kodak National High School Competition. He went on to attend the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University. After military service in 1957, he worked as a freelance photographer for Life Magazine and in 1958 became a member of Magnum Photos, the international photography agency.
Davidson continued to photography extensively from 1958 to 1961 creating such bodies of work as "The Dwarf", "Brooklyn Gang", and the "Freedom Rides". He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 to photograph what became a documentation of the "Civil Rights Movement". This work included images from an early Malcolm X rally in Harlem, steel workers in Chicago, Klu Klux Klan cross burnings, migrant farm camps in South Carolina, cotton pickers in Georgia and the protest marches and demonstrations in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. In 1963 the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his work in a "one man" show that included, among others, these historically important images.
In 1966 he was awarded the first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts, and spent two years documenting one block in East Harlem. This work was published by Harvard University Press in 1970 under the title "East 100th Street". The work became an exhibition that same year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Partial Bibliography
The Bridge, 1964
The Negro American, 1966
East 100th Street, 1970
Subsistence USA, 1973
Bruce Davidson, Photographs, 1978
Bruce Davidson, 1984
Subway, 1986
Central Park, 1995
Photo Poche 14, 1994
Brooklyn Gang, 1959, Published Nov. 1998
Portraits, 1999
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