Show me a grainy black and white photograph from the 1960s and I am sold. Which is welcome, because the work of Bruce Davidson is now on sale at Huxley-Parlour in London
I love the documentary photography of that time. Especially the work of Tony Ray-Jones, Marketa Luskacova, David Hurn, and Don McCullin.
Bruce Davidson [Magnum Photos] came to the UK from the States in the 1960s. On an assignment from Queen magazine to go and photograph the British.
Bruce Davidson Shoots the British
Driving around the country in a Hillman Minx for two months. He was able to capture the country as it transformed from pre-war to post-war. Gritty in many industrial areas that had not changed since the 1930s. A country still riven by class but changing rapidly.
“They gave me carte blanche because Cornell Capa told them, ‘If you want to get a beautiful set of pictures, let him take off. You will be surprised.’ And that’s what I did,” Davidson says.
His pictures were first published as Seeing Ourselves as an American Sees Us: A Picture Essay on Britain on April 12, 1961. “I was free to encounter life,” Davidson says. “I was open and didn’t have any agenda. There was a certain sense of sky and fog, of another place. That’s why those pictures are delicate – and I was delicate too. “
I have curated some of his photographs from that trip here.
Exhibition
You can visit the Bruce Davidson exhibition A United Britain. At Huxley-Parlour in Swallow St, between the 17th Jan and the 14th March.
Camera Wrist Strap
I have avoided dropping my camera so many times using a simple inexpensive wrist strap like this one. Cameras and expensive lenses do not bounce!
UK
USA