Finding the Humanity in His Subjects

Bruce Davidson may be the most influential photographer of the last 50 years you've never heard of.

Highly regarded by aficionados, affiliated with a prominent New York gallery, and his monographs circulated among art school students, the photographer, known for winning the trust of outsiders and the marginalized, has yet to have a major museum show.

Though by no means major, a small, intense exhibition now on view in a single gallery at the de Young Museum offers a taste of why he's widely admired. The 43 black & white vintage prints, a selection from recent gifts to FAMSF's collection, represent several series he produced early in his career between the 1950s and 1970s, a period that offers insight into a sensibility in its formative stages.

After growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, where his budding interest in the medium was nurtured by his mother, who built the 10-year-old Davidson a small darkroom in the basement of the family home, he graduated from Yale and soon discovered his metier as a member of the military press corps. While stationed at an army camp near Paris in 1956, he shot "Widow of Montmartre," a somber portrait of the widow of Impressionist painter Leon Fauche, seated at a table in the upstairs of her Paris apartment, surrounded by her dead husband's paintings. A solitary figure, lit in a room otherwise swathed in shadow, her face resting on her hand, and dark drapes partially obscuring a large slanted window to the street, she's awash in sorrow.

The emotional image is emblematic of the future work of an artist who's unafraid of feeling, bonds with his subjects, and finds humanity in scenes he photographs with a poignant simplicity. Shaped by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, Davidson in 1960 joined the celebrated Magnum photo agency, established by Robert Capa. That source of employment, and the first NEA grant ever awarded to a photographer, helped him sustain a combination of self-directed, instinctive, go-where-my heart-and-interest-take-me projects, and commercial assignments for The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire magazine and other publications. He even photographed Italian movie director Michelangelo Antonioni, on the set of "Zabriskie Point" in 1968.

The show starts with two seminal freelance projects where time and immersion played a key role. He traveled with a circus for four months, and carried forward the chord of melancholy he captured in Montmartre to his picture of Jimmy Armstrong, a.k.a. "The Little Man," a fellow with a deformed torso, regular-sized head and stunted legs who gazes out of an opening to his makeshift tent, isolated, wistful and resigned, his face in white greasepaint and exaggerated clown features ("Untitled (The Dwarf)" from Circus/Dwarf, 1958). Another photograph is a rear view of a pair of pachyderms whose enormous, leathery hindquarters are wedged together in a tent where, under a harsh light, these great animals endure the indentured servitude they've been consigned; a dwarf just outside lends scale and an aura of quiet tragedy.

Davidson developed rapport with a very different surrogate family in the summer of 1959, when he went to Coney Island to hang with the "Jokers" street gang. He was 26 at the time, a decade older than the average age of the gang members, but they seem relaxed in his presence. Bored and restless, they wile away days on the beach, on and under the boardwalk, smoking, showing off for each other and their girls, playing out "West Side Story" by the sea. "Clenched Fists," for instance, a picture of a tense young man watching the action in a dance hall, is reminiscent of the musical; another photograph landed on the cover of a 2009 Bob Dylan album.

Davidson, too, fell in love with their rough street beauty. "It wasn't about violence," he recalled, discussing the series in a Thirteen/WNET City Arts program. "It was about feeling, a sense of deep depression, anxiety and fear, yet primal vitality." In a telling image, the group, spent and beat at the end of a languorous day, sits at the back of a bus; next to them but making no eye contact is a weary African-American man, his arms crossed protectively. The subtext suggests racial division and the coming storm that would erupt in the 1960s.

Like many social justice photographers, Davidson was drawn to the civil rights movement in the South. The understated drama of Time of Change speaks to escalating tensions in works such as "Voter Registration, Alabama" (1965), in which an older African-American woman sits at a table, exposed light bulbs overhead, while a menacing lawman, the epitome of a racist Southern sheriff chomping on a cigar, lurks in the doorway; and "Mississippi Freedom March," where a group of young white toughs encircles a black protestor resting by the side of the road in the summer of 1963, the threat of violence in the air.

Now in his 80s, Davidson says he likes to walk city streets with his handheld camera, and then return to his dark room to make images from the impressions he gathered during the day. He eschews the usual professional labels, quipping that what he most wants is to be considered a "fine photographer," a title he certainly deserves.

Through Sept. 11