Prints and Drawings Room
View by appointment- Artist
- Bruce Davidson born 1933
- Part of
- Subway
- Medium
- Photograph, dye transfer print on paper
- Dimensions
- Image: 375 × 563 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery, courtesy of Jane and Michael Wilson 2017
- Reference
- P14829
Summary
This portfolio of forty-seven colour photographs was selected from a large body of work made by Davidson in 1980 in and around the New York Metropolitan subway system. The series was published in book form in 1980 and first exhibited in 1982 at the International Center for Photography, New York. In the series Davidson set out to document life in the subway, recording the animated energy of the heavily populated train carriages and station platforms. The artist has written about his intention for the series:
In transforming the grim, abusive, violent, and often beautiful reality of the subway into a language of color, I see the subway as metaphor for the world in which we live today. It is a great social equalizer. As our being is exposed, we confront our mortality, contemplate our destiny, and experience both the beauty and the beast. From the moving train above ground we see glimpses of the city, and as the train moves into the tunnel fluorescent light reaches into the gloom, and trapped inside, we all hang on together.
(Davidson 2003, p.122.)
In the early 1980s New York’s public transport system could be a menacing place, as Davidson’s memories of preparing for the project attests:
To prepare myself for the subway, I started a crash weight loss diet, a military fitness exercise program, and I jogged in the park early every morning. I knew I would need to train like an athlete to be physically able to carry my heavy camera equipment around in the subway for hours every day. Also, I thought that if anything was going to happen to me down there, I wanted to be in good shape, or at least believe that I was … As I went down the subway stairs, through the turnstile and onto the darkened station platform, a sinking sense of fear gripped me. I grew alert, looking around to see who might be standing, waiting to attack. The subway is dangerous at any time of the day or night, and everyone who rides it knows this and is on guard at all times; a day doesn’t go by that the newspapers don’t report yet another hideous subway crime.
(Ibid., pp.111–2).
Davidson’s pictures teem with a diverse cross-section of the city’s residents, people of all ages and races: businessmen, young lovers, gang members, weary commuters and wary tourists. They populate trains covered with colourful graffiti, evidence of the burgeoning street art movement of the period. Fred Brathwaite, better known as hip hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy, describes the vibrancy of graffiti culture in the early 1980s: ‘It was a tornado of multicolored mural like extravaganzas on the outsides [of subway cars], while interior signatures became an interlocking orgy of Jackson Pollock like drippy calligraphic madness.’ (Fred Brathwaite, ‘Bruce Davidson’s Subway’, in Davidson 2003, p.1.) Many of Davidson’s photographs capture the vitality of this new artform.
The Subway series is notable for its sensual use of colour. Prior to this body of work, Davidson was best known for socially engaged documentary projects made in black and white. To date, Subway remains the only series which Davidson has produced exclusively in colour, and the artist has described how he came to see colour as being crucial to the representation of its subject:
At first I photographed in black and white. After awhile I began to see a dimension of meaning that demanded color … I found that the strobe light reflecting off the metallic surfaces of the defaced subway cars created an iridescence I had seen in photographs of deep-sea fish thousands of fathoms below the ocean surface, glowing under electronic flash, never having been exposed to light before. People in the subway, their flesh juxtaposed against the metallic surfaces, and even the hollow darkness itself, moved me to uncover a beauty that goes unnoticed by passengers, who are themselves trapped underground, hide behind protective masks, closed off and unseeing.
(Davidson 2003, p.113.)
Davidson’s series recalls Walker Evans’s (1903–1975) influential photographic project Subway Portraits, taken surreptitiously on the New York subway between 1938 and 1941. Like Evans’s photographs, Davidson’s images provide a visual document of a particular moment in the history of New York. Whereas Evans’s unwitting subjects are often caught in moments of introspection or reverie, Davidson interacted directly with many of his sitters. The resulting images evoke an atmosphere that is simultaneously communal and confrontational forty years after Evans first used the subway as his setting.
Davidson’s portfolio was published by Rose Gallery, Santa Monica and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York with support from Jane and Michael Wilson. The editioned series was printed in 2006 by Guy Stricherz and Irene Mali at G&I Studio in Vashon, Washington in an edition of six with three artist’s proofs and one printer’s proof.
Further reading
Bruce Davidson, Subway, Los Angeles 2003.
Bruce Davidson, Journey of Consciousness, London 2009.
Rachel Taylor
January 2010
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