MADRID.- From May 28thto August 28th, 2016, Fundación MAPFRE presents the first retrospective exhibition in Spain on the work of Bruce Davidson, one of the leading exponents of humanist photography and member of the Magnum agency, at its exhibition hall in Barcelona (Casa Garraga I Nogués).

The exhibition offers an overview of the artist's entire career, more than fifty years of continuous work, and presents some of his most renowned series, such as Brooklyn Gang, East 100th Street and Time of Change: Civil Rights Movement. Also included in the selection are his latest works, Nature of Paris and Nature of Los Angeles.

Bruce Davidson set out on what was to become a passionate relationship with photography at a very young age. More than responding to a specific style, his work is characterized by a personal vision of reality that manifests itself in his art, not so much in the individual images as in the effect produced by the reiteration and juxtaposition of themes and characters. The spectator shares an intimacy with them that is made accessible through Davidson's charismatic presence, allowing him to reap the trust of the people being portrayed and easily gain access to their lives, even when dealing with controversial subjects. His work is therefore the reflection of an ethical commitment towards the harsh realities and the precarious and vulnerable environments in which the daily existence of the people being photographed unfolds.

The exhibition can also be visited starting next September at the Foundation's main site in Madrid, after which it will begin its international tour at the NederlandsFotomuseum in Rotterdam and CAMERA, Centro Italiano per la Fotografía de Turín (Italian Center for Photography in Turin).

Exhibition overview
The exhibition is organized in series, the same way Davidson usually works – focusing on one theme for a period of time that can sometimes span several years. The exhibition includes the most important series, in chronological order, within his extensive body of work.

The Walls, 1955
One day in 1955, while on duty with the military in Arizona, he ran into an elderly man who was driving an old Ford, and asked if he could photograph him: The driver was John Wall, who, together with his wife, Kate, warmly took Bruce Davidson in from that moment onward. For the first time, he created a personal project, developed freely and with the necessary care that would allow him to transmit a theme that to a certain extent belongs to the photographer's own private experience and which he shares with the audience. With some exaggerated light-dark contrasts and a delicate approach to the more intimate shots, the series introduces a daily narrative, the passing of time through small moments that are repeated monotonously within an timeless space and emanate a melancholic halo present throughout his early work.

The Widow of Montmartre, 1956
A year later, when Bruce Davidson was 22 years of age, he was stationed at an allied military camp near Paris, where he met Madame Margaret Fauché, the widow of a second-rate impressionist painter, Léon Fauché, who had known all the leading artists of the movement. Davidson visited her every weekend for months and took her portrait in a setting that is trappep suspended in time, in her small, crowded, memory-filled apartment, or during her walks through Paris's parks. Once again, and in a way that since then has become a hallmark of his work, Davidson deals with a subject that resonates with him on an emotional level, and which allows him to put his humanist ideals, his way of relating to others through photography, into practice.

The Dwarf, 1958
Bruce Davidson, who had recently joined the Magnum agency, produced one of his main series to date when he visited the Clyde Beatty circus, one of the most important well known of the United States, where many great figures of the American circus performed. But Davidson doesn't focus on the virtuosity or the feats of the stars that headline the circus billboards instead, he portrays the daily routines of the performers and workers behind the scenes and particularly the life of Jimmy Armstrong, a dwarf clown, a tireless worker, and a jack-of-all-trades, who entertained children with his costumes and jokes. The feeling of loneliness and isolation, coupled with the atmosphere of respect and humanity that exudes from these photographs transcends mere documentation. From these first series, an original way of approaching a theme can be seen, a commitment that distances it from the conventions of photojournalism.

Brooklyn Gang, 1959
Bruce Davidson read a newspaper article about a feud between two street gangs in Brooklyn and decided to reach out to them. Davidson was 25 years old and they were around 17. After spending some time with these young men, he gained their trust and started to feel a certain amount of empathy towards them. The series is not about street fights instead, it speaks of emotional tension, abuse and the feelings of abandonment these adolescent boys must face in an underprivileged neighborhood. Davidson’s plot speaks of the attainment of self-esteem, communication issues, group dependency and the creation of substitute family structures in an admirable fashion.

Davidson is not a street photographer in the traditional sense but neither is he a conventional photojournalist, and in this series, we find characteristics of both styles. The nimble gaze of his Leica, which allowed for a much more discreet, rapid and intuitive vision, makes this series more action-filled than the previous ones, with coarse, expressionist touches. A more gestural style and a furtive, partial, and transitory look that in the style of Robert Frank was adding new complexity to photography.

England/Scotland, 1960
Bruce Davidson was certainly aware of some images from the extraordinary portrait of English society produced by photographer Bill Brandt in his well-known book The English at Home (1936). In Davidson's work, one also encounters all levels of British society, sometimes through individual portraits clearly identifying their professions or more generic ones, such as the images that show the British working class during their days off at the beach. The country's strong social stratification and the cultural shock that Davidson must have felt on encountering a country where the vestiges of the world war were still ever so present are clearly visible in the work. In these street scenes, one can observe a clear reference to Henri Cartier-Bresson's classical method of photography. However, in other photographs with strongly contrasting black tones, an obvious graininess and a densely-created atmosphere, Davidson displays a photographic style that is more innovative and personal.

Time of Change, 1961-1965
The 1960’s were a turning point in the fight for civil rights in the United States and the beginning of one of the most uncertain periods in its modern social history. Bruce Davidson had just received a Guggenheim Grant for a project on the situation of youth in America and, at the same time, an assignment from The New York Times to cover the Freedom Rides. Overnight, he got on a bus full of young volunteers under the protection of the National Guard that left Montgomery (Alabama) for Jackson (Mississippi), where they were prepared to fight for civil rights. All of them were arrested on arrival.

As a whole, these photographs are of enormous historical value: they serve as an essential document in order to understand the importance of the fight towards obtaining civil rights. The first photographs in this series are imbued with the immediacy and urgency that describe a situation that must be reported– they are in fact, the most photo-journalistic images that we find in his work.

TRAVELLING YEARS, 1961-1965
ITALY, MEXICO, CHICAGO, LOS ANGELES, WALES, SPAIN
These were years of very intense activity for Bruce Davidson, and also of extraordinary creativity. He traveled widely and made photo essays about other places in the world, such as Oaxaca in Mexico or Sicily in Italy. He also came to Spain, where he had to cover the filming of a war film, Mandoperdido (Lost Command,1966), starring Anthony Quinn and Alain Delon, which was shot in Málaga and Almería. During the battle scenes, children appeared from everywhere, throwing themselves on the ground, imitating the dead soldiers. The children came from the neighborhood of La Chanca in Almería.

Another of the most interesting photo essays from those years was the one he produced about The Loop, the elevated trains that run through central Chicago. Davidson captures unprecedented views, and surprises with the use of street photography techniques in the unstable and fragmentary situations he records.
In Los Angeles, Davidson has a surprised and estranged gaze and aims to understand this strange world full of unwelcoming landscapes and bizarre characters through his camera with a coarser and more ironic perspective.

In Wales, Davidson became interested in the southern mining area. He knew and admired the work that W. Eugene Smith (1950) and Robert Frank (1953) had produced a decade earlier on the miners, and it is possible to see traces of both men's work - Smith's empathy for the workers as well as Frank's poetic, narrative form – in the images.

East 100th Street, 1966-1968
This is probably Bruce Davidson's best known project. The series was exhibited at MoMA the year after completion and the resulting book would become one of the decade's most influential. Davidson went to the derelict area known as Spanish Harlem or the Barrio, with the same affinity and commitment as in Brooklyn Gang or in the photographs about the struggle for civil rights, but now with a more pronounced sense of his responsibility towards the subject, tying in with the reformist intentions of photographer Lewis Hine. The neighborhood that Davidson was entering had become a ghetto, and that is how he portrays it. The description is so complete, comprehensive and intense that the spectator penetrates a world of Blacks and Latinos, who remained invisible to the outside world, bit by bit. His approach is neither moralizing nor overly sensitive. It is the result of the rapport and complicity between the photographer and the person being portrayed, the true key to having these people appear before the camera with their humanity intact.

On this occasion, Davidson changes strategy and uses a large-format camera, obtaining portraits that are halfway between a snapshot and a posed portrait as a result. The qualities provided by a larger negative and the use of flash also increase descriptive richness and precision.

Garden Cafeteria, 1973-1976
While Bruce Davidson was producing a documentary about Isaac Bashevis Singer, both would meet in a cafeteria in the Lower East Side, the Garden Cafeteria, where the writer was a regular customer. The clients that would gather there were Jews who had arrived in New York after the war, some of them Holocaust survivors and neighbors who had known one another all their lives. Davidson, also Jewish and whose family, like Singer’s, came from Poland, felt a certain proximity to these characters. Sometimes solitary and scarred by a terrible past, they would narrate the history of their painful lives over the course of the countless visits the artist made to the cafeteria to chat with them and photograph them. Now, with a small camera, but with a tripod and flash, Davidson once again manages to bring these characters into the foreground. The interesting thing about these individual portraits is that they are in turn group shots. In them, personal stories, shared sadness, memories of a distant and common past are superimposed, creating a dense atmosphere, as if frozen in time.

New York Subway, 1980
This newer and surprising series has nothing in common with other works produced in the New York subway system previously. The Walker Evans project, Many are Called, published in 1966, is widely known. Except for innovation and risk, there are no other points in common with the work of Bruce Davidson, and this is where the comparison is interesting. Part of what makes Evans' photographs appealing is the fact that he shot them blindly since it was forbidden to photograph on the subway system. He hid a small 35mm camera in his coat so all the people being photographed were unaware that they were having their picture taken. Davidson, on the other hand, traveled fully equipped with cameras and accessories that gave him away: as always, he had asked for permission from the authorities to work and almost always asked the same of the people he was going to photograph. Davidson enjoys the subway’s claustrophobic atmosphere. His style, somewhat invisible in the previous decades, starts to attain a dominant, even belligerent, presence.

Central Park, 1992-1995
When he photographed Central Park for the first time in 1960, Davidson was immersed in the Brooklyn Gang series; and so he chose to photograph the park’s natural environment and open spaces as an antidote to the tense and all-consuming nature of that project. Later, between 1992 and 1995, he would return to focus on Central Park as a primary subject in a conscious and deliberate manner. Bruce Davidson, who still lives a few blocks away, was used to strolling through the park, and was also a witness to the enormous change it had undergone in the past few years: it went from being a dangerous place to an authentic natural reserve in the heart of the city. He explored the park with a naturalist's ambition: he photographed trees, animals and people, both visitors and residents (the homeless people who took refuge there). With his usual passion, commitment and patience, he visited the park on a daily basis during those years, day and night and during every season of the year, making a complete visual and metaphorical record of that microcosm that is Central Park.

Nature of Paris, 2005-2006 / Nature of Los Angeles, 2008-2013
In the last few decades, Bruce Davidson has focused all his personal work on the subject of nature, which in the way of a trilogy, continues with the spaces in which nature overlaps with the city in Paris and Los Angeles. These are the two projects that close an extremely intense life dedicated to photography spanning more than fifty years of continuous work. When he produced them, Davidson was already in his sixties, but seemed to have the same energy, joviality and desire to learn that he had when he was young and still has today when working at the Museum of Natural History, close to his home. These last photographs are not part of a preconceived plan, except for continuing to research the relationship between urban spaces and nature. They are taken for his own enjoyment, with the aim of resting an eye trained in and weathered by the most committed themes, and in order to find meaning in the small details and discover unexpected revelations in these natural elements. In these projects, Davidson works with a large-format camera and a Hasselblad, sometimes incorporating a wide-angle lens making an already baffling and hostile landscape, in the case of Los Angeles, even more surreal.