Bruce Davidson spoke about his career at Levi’s Photo Workshop in Soho on December 9. The talk was broadcast live over Facebook to 35,000 viewers and was followed by an open question and answer session. Davidson is a street photographer known for his photo essays Brooklyn Gangs, Civil Rights, Lower East Side, Central Park, Subway, Circus, and East 100th Street. He recently finished compiling a retrospective of his work entitled Outside Inside. Davidson explained the title by saying that he “works from the inside.” He has spent long periods of time with his subjects, sometimes several years, and favored taking pictures of “everyday people in life.” For the East 100th Street shoot he described using a 4×5 view camera to get eye to eye with his subjects. During the 60s he photographed the Civil Rights marchers, giving up a lucrative career in fashion photography to pursue a subject to which he felt personally connected. Currently Davidson is photographing Los Angeles landscapes, describing it as “nature we overlook” – similar to the way that many of his subjects have been overlooked by society. His approach to photography was made clear in the response, when asked about maintaining a distance from his subjects, that “some people you can’t get close enough to.” The evening ended with Davidson signing copies of his book and meeting audience members.
