Object Details
Artist
Bruce Davidson
Date
1965 (negative); around 2016 (print)
Medium
Gelatin silver print
Dimensions
Image / sheet: 11 × 14 inches (27.9 × 35.6 cm)
Mat: 14 × 18 inches (35.6 × 45.7 cm)
Credit Line
Acquired through the Class of 1962 Fund for Photography
Object
Number
2016.058
Bruce Davidson considers himself an observer rather than a political actor, whose work as a photogra(…)
Bruce Davidson considers himself an observer rather than a political actor, whose work as a photographer is driven by a desire to understand the lives of other people and to tell his own story in relation to theirs. Yet, in multiple series completed over decades, he has used his platform as a photojournalist with the storied Magnum agency to promote activist causes, and a deeply felt vision of the world as a place of hope and beauty in the face of alienation at best, and systematic oppression and violence at worst. He began photographing civil rights protests in the South in 1961, after reading about attacks on the anti-segregationist Freedom Riders. He stayed with the subject for the next five years. In March 1965, on one of three marches setting out from Selma, Alabama, in defiance of the state-sponsored suppression of Black voters, Davidson photographed numerous times a young man who had painted the word “vote” on his forehead—as Davidson has noted, at great danger to himself. “The national guard was alongside. They were in the woods, waiting for anything to happen. They couldn’t be trusted. The police couldn’t be trusted.” The young man survived. Davidson has not been able to find him in the years since. (Kate Addleman-Frankel, The Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography, June 2020)