Picking a favorite, or even a representative, project by Bruce
Davidson can be a daunting task. There’s the ultra-cool greaser chic of
his 1959 series, Brooklyn Gang; his seminal civil rights photos,
in which he spent months of his own time on freedom marches and in
sharecropper shacks; most famously, there was East 100th Street,
wherein he concentrated on one city block in Spanish Harlem for two
years, creating an unforgettable extended portrait of the streets and
their residents. And in the early ’80s, he rode subways obsessively,
thrusting his camera in the faces of New Yorkers who didn’t always take
kindly to his artistic aims.
Last summer, Davidson worked on commission for Care Oregon, an
administrative branch of the Oregon Health Plan. Over the course of two
visits to the state, he photographed patients who had received benefits
from the Health Plan, with the goal of humanizing these Oregonians in
the eyes of our state legislators.
Davidson will be in Portland this weekend for a lecture at the art
museum and a weekend-long, career-spanning exhibition organized by
Stoots Fine Photography.
MERCURY: You’ve said that the Care Oregon project
was one of the most meaningful assignments you’ve ever had.
DAVIDSON: Yes. This was a cross-section of very ill people who are
usually sort of invisible to us. I want to break through that
invisibility and create an image that somehow has some meaning. Not
only for them, but for people who could help them. But it was the Care
Oregon people that made it happen; they were the ones that made contact
with the people. I just floated in.
Does that happen often, that you just float into and out of your
subject’s lives?
In my career—50 years of photography—there’s always a
context and a way of entering a world. In the case of Brooklyn
Gang, I just hung out with them for a long time. In the case of
East 100th Street, I worked under the auspices of the citizen
committee on the block. There’s always something that gives context and
a way into a world. And sometimes a context is like in the civil rights
movement—it’s what’s happening around. Once I went on a freedom
ride, a bus ride in ’61, that really sensitized me. Up until then I was
just another white kid. It sensitized me to the segregation in the
South.
This sensitization—did it change the way you approached
people you photograph, or your relationship with them?
It did because I exposed myself as a photographer. I was taking some
risks in photographing the South in the way that I was. Sneaking in and
photographing a Ku Klux Klan cross burning. Walking along with the
marchers on several of the marches—including the Selma march.
That changed my perspective and sensitized me to the plight of people.
That was a very important awakening.
I’ve always thought that most of your pictures are as much about
the relationship between you and the subject as it is about the
subjects themselves.
Yeah, I think that in the case with East 100th
Street—working the way I worked there—I became a part
of the picture myself. It was important that there was an eye-to-eye,
face-to-face relationship between the subject and the photographer.
Subway is very intimate too; but it’s intimate in a lot of
different ways. And in the case of the Civil Rights photographs, I was
part of the march. I was never one of the press corps.
What happens to photographs like the Care Oregon project? On
commissions like these, does the work usually just get seen by the
small, intended audience?
I don’t know. What I do know is that it fits very well with some of
the commissions and assignments I’ve had over the years. For example, I
was assigned to photograph the children after the Oklahoma City
Bombing. I photographed Senator Max Cleveland, who lost two legs and an
arm. This Care Oregon work fits very well. I think it’s very important
that hospitals or banks or whatever have a sense of the impact of real
photography.
I don’t mean this flippantly, but you obviously believe in the
power of photography to change the world.
It’s not a panacea. But if we didn’t have those photographers who
were working, coming to grips with the meaning of life in this era…
it’s better to have a picture than not have any at all. I would venture
to say [that] when a state senator from Oregon looks at these images,
he’s got to change his idea and awareness of these people who are
really sort of invisible to us.