Bruce Davidson: Subway

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I revisited the Lower East Side cafeteria where I’d photographed several years before… The cafeteria was a haven for the elderly Jewish people surviving the decaying nearby neighborhoods. Still, within it, the photographer communicates an increasingly widespread sense of solidarity between the inhabitants of the subterranean – there is harmony within the underground malaise. Davidson's accompanying text tells the story behind the images, clarifying his method and dramatizing his obsession with the subway, its rhythms and its particular madness. His naked prose, together with his compelling images, evoke the speeding sensation of a subway car, tunneling out of the darkness into a new light and unmistakable beauty.

Passengers on the platform looked at me, with my expensive camera around my neck, in a way that made me feel like a tourist—or a deranged person. Davidson also brought several rolls of film, a notebook, a subway map, and a wedding album containing photos of the people he had already photographed in the subway.He became a member of Magnum Photos in 1958, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1967 and 1980, the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Photography in 2004, and a Gold Medal of Honor Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Arts Club in 2007. He spent a year photographing the New York subway system using Kodachrome 64 film in a Canon 35mm camera. If you are afraid of photographing on New York’s subway system today, imaging spending five years in the height of the tough ’80s New York with a giant flash. A woman named Kathy, staring at herself in a cigarette machine in one of his most famous photographs, shot herself with a shotgun.

Thus, in the subway, Davidson resists the itch to take the gritty high-contrast black and white portraits common during that time and used purposefully to convey emotions.

Davidson is also famous for "East 100th street" (Andrew Roth, The Book of 101 Books, page 196/197; Martin Parr, Gerry Badger, The Photobook, volume 1, page 18). With cloth portfolio containing color dye transfer print measuring 6 3/4 x 9 3/4 inches, signed and editioned in pencil by the photographer on verso. This photograph was taken as part of an ongoing series of color subway portraits in the early 1980s.