''If I sold every print in the collection I could buy the building I'm living in,'' he added, at which point his wife, Emily Haas Davidson, demurred, blushing. ''Not that they're coming knocking,'' he said.
There are other photos on the walls, among them a shot of Marilyn Monroe taken from the doomed desert filming of ''The Misfits'' (''I found Marilyn Monroe a lot more interesting than the horses,'' he said, mischievous eyes peering over his spectacles.) The bulk of the work, however, on the walls or in the books he has arranged on a living room table, is a sprawling visual genealogy of New York. From the subways of the 1980's, where Mr. Davidson found deep chords of humanity amid the ruin and graffiti, to the now-vanished Garden Cafeteria on East Broadway, where Yiddish-speaking intellectuals hunched over newspapers and bialys, his New York, his photographs, are of a city that no longer is.
Yet art hangs on after people and places have moved on. In Mr. Davidson's photographic New York, the city sees itself as it was, and learns something of what it is. Next month, on the heels of ''Time of Change,'' a collection of his photographs from the civil rights era, a new version of ''East 100th Street,'' Mr. Davidson's classic 1970 book of photographs of a block in East Harlem then called the city's ''most notorious slum,'' is being issued by St. Ann's Press, a small publisher of high-quality art books. Some 35 never-before-published photographs are included. In a career that has included books like ''Subway'' and ''Brooklyn Gang,'' award-winning films and countless exhibitions, including a current one of the civil rights pictures at the International Center for Photography, his portrait of a single New York block will probably stand as among his most enduring works.
Photographing Inner Space
Mr. Davidson, who was born and raised in Oak Park, Ill., and educated at Yale, got his first glimpse of East Harlem in the late 1950's, when he was living in Hartsdale, N.Y., and commuting to his job in the lab at Eastman Kodak in Manhattan. From the Park Avenue viaduct he would peer into the windows of East Harlem, particularly at night, when the light illuminated a view beyond the brick walls. But not until a decade later did he set out to get beyond those walls, after hearing about a block said to represent the nadir of urban poverty and ruin.
''At the time we were sending rockets to the moon,'' Mr. Davidson said. ''I felt the need to photograph inner space. I wanted to explore the block as an entity, to treat it as a molecular structure.''
For the next two years, he gradually won a place in the community, becoming known as the ''picture man,'' each morning taking still-wet prints to give to his subjects, whom he photographed with a large architectural-view camera.
''I wanted to lend the act of photography a sense of dignity,'' he said. ''This wasn't a 'Candid Camera' running around taking pictures with a noisy motor drive. I wasn't spying or intruding.'''
As a result, his subjects, despite peering out from small, dark rooms (often adorned with images of John F. Kennedy and Jesus Christ), or standing among rubble-and-weed-strewn lots, brim not only with a reverence for the occasion but also with hope and humanity, as if by staring into the lens they were seeing both the best image of themselves and a view of a better world.
Windows are the fragile yet impermeable boundaries between public and private life in New York, so not surprisingly a few of the shots were voyeuristic glimpses of children peering from behind the security gates of gray tenements. More common, however, was an interior shot that showed the life through the window.
''I wanted to explore not only the rooms, but what you saw out the window, across the courtyard and into infinity,'' he said. ''Not only the room, but what the room saw.'' It was a view he had never seen. As Mr. Davidson recalled, ''I was very affected by the mood of the rooms, the little sense of embellishment, the lace curtain, the plastic covering the couch.'' One photograph shows a woman, a young woman, but as Mr. Davidson noted, ''She just looks to me as someone who in her young life has really seen it.'' She is clutching herself on a bed, sheets drawn up around her, exposing a dingy mattress. Behind her in the middle of a tired wall hangs a single object, a heart-shaped Valentine box.
The poignancy of the gesture was just one of many instances in which Mr. Davidson, in getting through the windows, was able to render what had been treated as a social abstraction -- poverty -- into a world with sharply defined lives. New York may be a public stage, but it is filled with private actors who carry with them their own worlds and identities, which they keep protected.
Mr. Davidson, once called ''the outsider's insider,'' has not so much shed light on these discrete New York worlds with the sharp flash of a Weegee, but rather illuminated them from within, as if he were a kind of social lantern.
The Lost World of a Street Gang
In his 1959 series ''Brooklyn Gang,'' published originally in Esquire with a text by Norman Mailer, and in 1998 as a book, Mr. Davidson entered the lives of a South Brooklyn street gang called the Jokers whose usual haunt was a local candy store.
''They had had a rumble that was written up in the newspaper, and I went out and offered to take photographs of their wounds, in color,'' he said. He stayed on. ''They had a youth board worker with them, and I had a tendency to come when I knew he wasn't going to be around.'' Mr. Davidson was 25 at the time, living in a one-room walkup in Greenwich Village.
''I had a kitchen/darkroom combination with a red light in my refrigerator,'' he said. ''I had a mattress on the floor, no girlfriend, and lived like a monk.''
The photographs today portray a lost world of stickball and boardwalks, of Vaseline hair and rolled sleeves, Kent Filters and Karl Droge Big Squeeze Ices, basement dances and Susie the Elephant Skin Girl at Coney Island. The atmosphere was tight and intense, filled with flinty looks and an almost accidental glamour, where tattoos were more a fierce indoctrination than a calculated lifestyle choice.
As with his other projects, Mr. Davidson needed entry, and he got it in the form of the gang leader, known as Bengie.
''He was kind of a brilliant visual guy,'' Mr. Davidson said. ''He took me to this roof, and I remember thinking, 'This kid's going to throw me off the roof and then rob me,' but he's pointing down at the stickball game and saying, 'Get that,' and saying: 'Oh, there's the
Statue of Liberty. You can see it through all these television antennas.'''
The images of that summer have an eternal quality to them, as if the gang might still be drinking beer in paper cups on the beach, but the Jokers' world was already beginning to change. Heroin was making an entrance; one gang member died from an overdose at 19.
A few years ago, Bengie got in touch with Mr. Davidson.
''I went out with him to the old neighborhood,'' the photographer said. The candy store where the gang used to hang out was gone. ''He took me for a cafe latte.'' The neighborhood had changed, and so had the Jokers; Bengie is now a drug counselor, and Mr. Davidson's wife is writing a book about his life.
In the apartment, Ms. Davidson pointed to a photo of Bengie back then, glaring out from a wall, standing beneath a thermometer that says ''Have a Pepsi.'' ''You can see the frustration,'' she said. ''He's so angry. He looked right out at Bruce, and the thermometer behind him seems to be registering his anger, rage and depression.''
''I'm Bruce's biggest fan,'' she added as an aside. He says that no one can explain his photos better than his wife can. The 'Picture Man' in East Harlem.
On the morning of a recent winter storm, East 100th Street between First and Second Avenues seemed a serene, enclosed world. The hard edges of buildings and streets were shrouded in snow, and one struggled to make out signs: A faded polychromatic Jesus in a shop window, above the words ''Yo Reinare''; a bumper sticker saying ''Allah Is the Way''; a placard in a tenement window urging ''Stronger Rent Laws Now.''
The world that Mr. Davidson had captured decades before seemed a faint echo. On the north side of the street, then home to a block's length of tenements, stand a park, a set of baseball diamonds and a construction site. Where tenements once stretched all the way to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, there are now tall buildings and a sense of open space.
There are no rubble-strewn lots, no boys flying kites from rooftops, but there are ominous warnings on buildings from the Manhattan district attorney's Trespass Program, and if you stand on a corner for a few minutes, you will attract furtive whistles from passers-by, the usual tenuous calling card offering illicit urban transactions.
When Mr. Davidson first sought access to these precincts in the late 1960's, he had begun by approaching the Rev. Norman Eddy, a Union Theological Seminary graduate who had opened a storefront church on the block. Mr. Eddy told Mr. Davidson he would have to meet with a citizens' committee to get permission to photograph the block. Residents were still furious over a newspaper article that described the block as ''a microcosm of the worst conditions and worst elements of the city.''
Mr. Eddy, who still lives in the neighborhood, does not deny that things were bad on East 100th Street. ''There were, at the very least, 4,000 people living between First and Second Avenues,'' he said. ''There were shootings, drugs, prostitution.'' But there was also a vibrant sense of community, and, emanating from the small storefront churches and citizens' groups, a burgeoning spirit of revitalization. ''The community we had on the block was unparalleled,'' he said. ''That's one of the gifts of blocks, where the people on a block can get to know each other in a very intimate way.''
They would soon know Mr. Davidson, too. Once he had withstood a grilling from the citizens' committee, promising to photograph only with a subject's permission, he became a fixture on the street, the ''picture man.'' Throughout the year, he occasionally returned, to photograph a family reunion or a brochure for the neighborhood group. Mildred Feliciano, 71, a longtime resident active in community affairs, says in a new afterword to the book that residents showed Mr. Davidson's photographs to five mayors in their efforts to improve conditions. ''These photographs are not only historical,'' she wrote, ''but helped in the rebuilding of our community.''
Mr. Davidson, for his part, emphasizes that he is a photographer, not a social worker. ''I tend to find myself in worlds that I explore,'' he said, ''and it isn't until I'm through with it that I realize what I've done and what it's done to me, and what effect I might have on people that see me photograph or see my photography.''
He has a motto for his work: ''Be there when the conditions are right for you to be there.'' In 1968, the residents of East 100th Street were ready for the world to see another side of the block. The world did, not only in the book, but in a 1970 show at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1998, with a fellowship from the Open Society Institute, Mr. Davidson returned to the block to rephotograph it. He was impressed by the changes. ''There's a lot of new building, some of it quite expensive,'' he said. ''There's still a lot to be done, but there's an undercurrent of positive things happening.''
On a recent trip to the block, Mr. Davidson was approached by several youths. When he showed them the new edition of the book, they recognized one couple, young lovers leaning against each other in what Mr. Davidson remembered as a ''hopeful'' image. Damon, the man in the picture, had been killed by a close-range shotgun blast to the back, the youths said. The woman, they think, is still in the neighborhood.
Among his subjects the second time around were the participants in an East 100th Street program called ''Reviving Baseball in the Inner City,'' which uses baseball as a character- and community-building endeavor. Mr. Davidson's 1998 photographs show the park and baseball diamonds that have replaced the block of tenements. Yet already that picture has changed, with an incoming housing development reclaiming much of that land. Mr. Davidson reports, however, that the builders are preserving space for two diamonds.
Splendor and Squalor in the Park.
Another discrete New York world that Mr. Davidson entered as it was on the cusp of transition was Central Park. His 1986 book of the same name catalogs its life in all its splendor and squalor: the dead leaves of winter, the covert courtship rituals of humans and other animals, the shoulders of the steely city crowding these sylvan pockets, a homeless man sleeping in a box framed by a pastoral scene, the people who come to the park to escape their everyday lives and the people for whom the park is everyday life. Mr. Davidson joined the secret daily life of the park, the encamped homeless, the habitual bird feeders.
The project began as a National Geographic assignment, one he did not want.
''I hated the place,'' he said. ''When my children were growing up'' -- he has two grown daughters, both photographers, who live in Seattle -- ''it was like a dust bowl. You didn't know whether they were going to sit on a hypodermic needle.'' He exposed 500 rolls of film, mostly color, but the magazine rejected the work.
''They said there were too many homeless. They wanted me to photograph a drug bust, which you almost have to set up to get.'' Undaunted, he returned shot the park again, as he wanted, in black and white.
The city for him remains a continuing obsession. There are infinite worlds still to explore: he has been photographing the city's waterfront off and on for the last decade. As ever, there is the sense that what he photographs today might be a last look.
''Before 9/11, I began photographing certain essences of the city, for example, a view of the George Washington Bridge that I hadn't seen done before. I also began photographing the elevator banks of the World Trade Center.'' He had wanted to spend a year photographing the entire trade center, a city unto itself.
Mr. Davidson, who had the distinction of being the Central Park Conservancy's first artist-in-residence, would like nothing more than the photographic keys to the city.
''My dream assignment,'' he said, ''is that Mayor Bloomberg calls me up in the middle of the night and says: 'I had this great idea. We should have an artist in residence. I'll write you a letter with a seal that will allow you to go wherever you want to go. And don't call me before you're finished.''' The picture man is ready.
