On May 25, 1961,
Bruce Davidson joined a group of Freedom Riders traveling by bus from Montgomery, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi.
The actions of the Riders tested federal laws permitting integrated interstate
bus travel. These historic episodes, which ended in violence and arrests,
marked the beginning of Davidson’s exploration into the heart of the civil
rights movement in the United
States during the years 1961–1965. In 1962,
Davidson received a Guggenheim Fellowship and continued documenting the era,
including an early Malcolm X rally in Harlem, steel workers in Chicago, a Ku
Klux Klan cross burning near Atlanta, migrant farm camps in South Carolina,
cotton picking in Mississippi, protest demonstrations in Birmingham, and the
heroic Selma march that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was
instrumental in changing the political power base in the segregated Southern
states. Davidson’s work on view in this exhibition includes intimate and
revealing portraits of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Congressman John Lewis, and
other leaders during those turbulent times. Davidson’s lyrical images are both
poignant and profound as they describe the mood that prevailed during the civil
rights movement.
Bruce Davidson is
a major figure in modern photography, who has created compelling documentary
work for over forty years. Born in 1933, he began taking photographs at the age
of ten. After military service in 1957 he worked as a freelance photographer
for Life, and in 1958 he became a member of Magnum Photos. Davidson continued
to photograph extensively from 1958 to 1965, creating such bodies of work as
The Dwarf, Brooklyn Gang, Subway, East
100th Street, and The Civil Rights Movement. He
received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 to document youth in the South during
the civil rights movement, and in 1966 was awarded the first grant for
photography from the National Endowment for the Arts. Davidson’s work has been
shown at many of the world’s leading museums, including the Museum of Modern
Art, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; Walker Art
Center, Minneapolis; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and Parco
Gallery, Tokyo. He continues to work as an editorial and documentary
photographer and his work appears regularly in publications all over the globe.
Aperture has published three monographs on the work of Davidson: Central Park, Portraits, and Subway.
