Bruce Davidson
Untitled, Time of Change (Damn the Defiant)), 1965

Davidson Photos Document Time of Change

Forty-five years after Martin Luther King gave voice to his dream for equality, a collection of photographs from the Civil Rights movement revives a time that changed both North and South. The exhibition, Bruce Davidson: Time of Change—Photographs from the Civil Rights Movement, will be on view through January 4 at the Greenville County Museum of Art.

Born in Illinois in 1933, Bruce Davidson won his first photography award at the age of 16 when he submitted a picture of an owl in a national contest. He studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University, then entered the Army and served as a photographer in the Signal Corps. While stationed in Paris, he began an association with Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the founders of the Magnum photography cooperative, who mentored the young artist and encouraged him to join Magnum in 1958.

 Just three years later, Davidson began to focus his lens on the people, places, and events that symbolized the American Civil Rights movement. Traveling through the South with the Freedom Riders, he worked for the New York Times and Life magazine, taking pictures of Tennessee sharecroppers, cotton pickers in South Carolina, and school children in Selma. His iconic images include a Ku Klux Klan rally in Atlanta, a woman sprayed by police hoses in Birmingham, and the march for voting rights in Alabama. Time of Change includes 31riveting images.

In 1962, Davidson received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support this documentary work. He was in Washington on August 28, 1963, when thousands marched to the Lincoln Memorial to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. call for racial harmony and human equality. In 1966, Davidson received the first grant for photography awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and he spent two years documenting a block of East 100th Street in East Harlem. These photographs were the subjects of a one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
 
Davidson is considered an “editorial photographer,” one who focuses his lens on unfolding events in a documentary manner that is both realistic and expressive. His photographs are stark and unvarnished, yet dramatic and brutally honest.
“Few contemporary photographers give us their observations so unembellished—so free of apparent craft or artifice,” said John Szarkowski, the former Director of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. “The presence that fills these pictures seems to be the presence of the life that is described, scarcely changed by its transmutation into art.”

Davidson now lives in New York and remains a vital practicing photographer. He returned to East 100 Street in 1998 to record the renovation and transformation that occurred during that area’s economic and social rebirth, and he shared his photos in a community slide show that featured a discussion with people who live in the neighborhood. He received the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Photography in 2004 and the National Arts Club's Gold Mdeal Visual Arts Award in 2007.

Bruce Davidson: Time of Change—Photographs from the Civil Rights Movement, was organized by Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York. The artist’s work was also included in the Road to Freedom exhibition organized last spring at the High Museum in Atlanta.

The Greenville County Museum of Art is located at 420 College Street in downtown Greenville, South Carolina. Galleries opens at 11:00 am Tuesday through Saturday and at 1:00 pm on Sunday. The Museum closes at 5:00, except on Thursday, when doors remain open until 8:00 pm. Admission to the Museum is always absolutely free.  For information, call 864/271-7570, or email info@greenvillemuseum.org

Photo Credits:  All photos by Bruce Davidson, Courtesy Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY

Untitled, Time of Change (Vote), 1965

Untitled, Time of Change (Damn the Defiant), 1963