In 2009 I bought the Steidl published 'Bruce Davidson Outside inside', a three-book boxed set with 942 pages and 834 photos. It's a quite remarkable collection of this photographer's reportage work. Now in his nineties, Davidson has returned to his archives to select photos for 'The way back', a sort of supplement to 'Outside inside.'
The 128 photos are a selection from 1957 to 1992, though he was working commercially before '57. There are sixteen main selections (with three photos or more) and with others just one or two shots. Maybe his most well known work was documenting East 100th Street, New York between 1966 and 1968. Here are sixteen photos, including eight in color that were not in the ninety-one in 'Outside inside.'
Almost all the pictures includes people, one of Davidson's work characteristics, where he photographs ordinary people in their normal environment, whether Welsh coal miners or customers in a burger bar. On page ninety-five one photo stopped me, taken in 1963, it shows a construction worker jumping from a girder to a much smaller one and I wondered if Cartier-Bresson's famous 'Decisive moment' from 1932 had flashed across Davidson's mind. Two different places but both men are in near identical movement.
Steidl have produced the near perfect photobook, one photo a page (with a 175 screen) and generous margins. The paper is a silky matt art making it a pleasure to turn the pages but slightly annoying is putting all the one line captions on a back page so the reader has to do a lot of flipping.
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