Bruce
Davidson is a witness of last century. One of these photographers who
scanned America until in his faults, in his arrogance, his contempt of
the men. This America which a long time wanted to be unaware of its
misery and fact of the Blacks of disinherited, without rights nor
voice. Bruce Davidson with a simple camera knew to found a true
intimacy with the misfits of the company of the years 1960. Born in
Chicago, graduate of the university of Yale, it carries out its first
photographic subject in Paris, heading “the widow of Paris”, report
which it shows in Henri Cartier-Bresson. He from now on will
collaborate in the largest magazines of the sixties like Life or Queen.
It is interested very quickly in the social problems of America, in
particular those of the Blacks. This exhibition gathers a hundred
pulling divided into two series, one entitled “Time of Change,
1961-1965”, the other “100e Rue, 1966-1968”. The memory often has
absences. Bruce Davidson is there for us to point out it. The fight for
the civic rights of the Blacks is not so remote, forty years at the
maximum. The images of this combat were sometimes erased. With this
exhibition, they are there, without pageantry, in the simplicity of a
testimony. Bruce Davidson has the social glance. But it does not trap
misery, nor the injustice, it collects it, in empathy with its
subjects. A complicity which starts, by its sincerity, a true
awakening, beyond the simple emotion. There is in its photographs, in
addition to a large respect for what it shows, a human approach which
upsets, which pushes to marry the combat of these men and his wives and
whose Bruce Davidson is the spokesman.
Foundation HCB, Paris, until 22 april 2007.
