The year 2004 was the 100th year anniversary of New York Subway system. To celebrate this event, the Museum of the City of New York had organized an exhibition of three different well-known subway artists: Bruce Davidson, Camilo Jose Vergara, and Sam Hollenshead. Among these artists, Bruce Davidson’s “Subway: photographs by Bruce Davidson” was in spotlight. His photographs guided the audiences to travel back to the underground of the 1980s. The photographer offers the encounter with the past through the pictures that are already part of the history, and the audiences reminisce themselves in both past and present through this pleasant experience.

Gallery Lumiere President Mi Li Choi was invited to Bruce Davidson’s house and interviewed him, while she visited New York to attend the 25th AIPAD(the Association of International Photography Art Dealers). The artist was extremely excited to hear that thirty of his Subway photographs will be exhibited in Korea. Three times a day, the audience will be able to hear the conversation with him along with gallery talks.


From 1979 to 1980, Bruce Davidson’s camera lens give a steady gaze at New York subway filled with different ethnics. It closes up to the world we live in, and people who are surviving through. An embracing couple with big smiles, expressions with energy and confidence, tensed faces, violent and outrageous actions…His works elaborate dark, rough, and dangerous but beautiful reality in visual language.

Bruce Davidson explained why he took pictures of Subway; “When in the subway, what is beautiful appears bestial, and what is bestial becomes beautiful…People in the subway, their flesh juxtaposed against the metallic surfaces, and even the hollow darkness itself, moved me to uncover a beauty that goes unnoticed by passengers, who are themselves trapped underground, hide behind protective masks, closed off and unseeing.” As a successful documentary photographer, the reality in subway is a world within a world and the individuals in the subway became appropriate subjects of the artist’s personal passion.

Davidson began to explore the underground world in 1979. He traveled through more than 600 miles in the subway in dawn or late at night. He captures the stark, sullen, and true individuals following their destinations. Through nasty but beautiful world of underground, his images of life on subway express the beauty and the beast, light and dark, and mortality.

Episodes (from Subway, 2003)
Bruce, after having been mugged twice on the subway, agreed to accompany undercover police to get the picture of a mugger in action. One cop dressed as a Hassidic with a gold chain around his neck pretending to be asleep. Bruce sat on the other end of the train as they waited past stop after stop. A crook come into the car and decides to snatch the chain. The undercover cop springs into action, apprehending the thief and with one shot Bruce captures the moment.

Davidson’s major bodies of work are ‘The Dwarf’, which follows a lonely clown in a traveling circus, and ‘Brooklyn Gang’, which depicts the isolation, tension, and vitality of a group of New York teenagers. With the Guggenheim Fellowship, He documented the Civil Rights Movement in the South (‘Time of Change, The Civil Rights Movement’). In 1963, he had his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
Davidson was presented with the first Fellowship from NEA (The National Endowment for the Arts) for a project to photograph the inhabitants of a rundown tenement block in Spanish Harlem on an ‘eye-to-eye’ level. (‘East 100th Street’) This Modern classic work was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. ‘Central Park’ was a four-year encounter with the convergence of humanity, nature, and the city that grew into an epic homage.

Selected Solo Exhibition

Selected Group Exhibitions

Selected Awards

Selected Publications

Selected Collections