Bruce Davidson

'All This Happened: Twenty Nine Years of ROSEGALLERY' will be on view from 14 September - 30 October 2021. The group exhibition features works by Jo Ann Callis, Kennedi Carter, John Chiara, Lieko Shiga, Dorothea Lange, William Eggleston, Rinko Kawauchi, Lise Sarfati, Robbert Flick, Tania Franco Klein, Steve Galloway, Graciela Iturbide, Shaun McCracken, Manfred Müller, Elger Esser, Huger Foote, Bruce Davidson, Tomoko Sawada, Megan Cotts, Shaun McCracken, Diana Markosian, and more.

Bruce Davidson first came to Los Angeles in 1964 on assignment for Esquire magazine. As a young New Yorker in LA, he found himself at odds with what he described as a “cultural desert with acrid air, bumper-to-bumper traffic, tall palms, and seedy Hollywood types.” Nearly 45 years after Davidson first visited Los Angeles, he returned to the city with a vastly different shooting agenda. The crowded and buzzing social landscape of 1964 now serves as a distant backdrop for the quiet integrity of Davidson’s clawed up yuccas, attenuated palms, and parched hillsides.

For an entire year in the early 1980s Bruce Davidson dwelt in New York City's underground; traversing six-hundred miles of subway lines with a Canon T-90, and a sunpak strobe hooked to the battery pack at his hip. Before the days of guarded subway depots and homeland security incentives, Davidson roamed freely amidst subterranean grafitti grottos, aiming his lens at the vibrant and virulent. ROSEGALLERY is pleased to present the culmination of Bruce Davidson's exploration—the only body of color work by New York's legendary photographer.

In 1961, Bruce Davidson traveled to Montgomery, Alabama to photograph the Freedom Riders. His experience there was the beginning of a five year entanglement with the Civil Rights Movement. Davidson's photographs, however, are not tributes to inviolate righteousness: they are a frank depiction of a tumultuous and disparate society whose future and whose character were still far from certain.