Bruce Davidson: Subway

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This helped perpetuate a certain stereotype among the community, which stills exists in the hearts and minds of some people to this day. Institutional support for the Museum is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture. In 1980, after living in New York City for 23 years, Davidson began Subway, his startling color essay of urban life. This edition adds forty unseen images to the original book, and includes a new introduction by Arthur Ollman of the Museum of Photographic Art in San Diego, and a foreword by Fred Braithwaite (aka Fab Five Freddy), the original graffiti artist. Here, the enclosed world of the subway is a metaphor for New York itself, in all its frantic hustle and bustle its violence, its humanity and its hope.

Sometimes, I’d take the picture, then apologize, explaining that the mood was so stunning I couldn’t break it, and hoped they didn’t mind.In 1960, he was invited to the United Kingdom by the Queen Magazine for two months, where he documented the idiosyncratic indifference of the island’s natives from the American perspective. 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. Here, the enclosed world of the subway is a metaphor for New York itself, in all its frantic hustle and bustle--its violence, its humanity and its hope.

In transforming the grim, abusive, violent, and yet often serene reality of the subway into a language of color, I see the subway as a metaphor for the world in which we live today. An Introductory, How-To Guide for Beginners: Learn about the basics of street photography in this easy to digest guide. 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.While getting intimately close with his subjects was paramount to his success, Davidson did not think of himself as a documentary photographer, saying, “Documentary photography suggests you just stand back, that you’re not in the picture, you’re just recording.