ROSEGALLERY | Bergamot Station Arts Center | 2525 Michigan Ave G-5 | Santa Monica | CA 90404 | P: 310.264.8440 | F: 310.264.8443 | info@rosegallery.net | www.rosegallery.net
BRUCE DAVIDSON SUBWAY Subway is the first major body of color work by legendary Magnum photographer, Bruce Davidson. Color is essential to the scenes depicted. The faces, metal, graffiti, the moist skin would be shortchanged in black and white. Even the darkness is color darkness. In the late 1970s and early 1980s a few major exhibitions introduced color to great numbers of artist photographers. Droll observations by William Eggleston, and urban work by Helen Levitt, Joel Meyerowitz, and Stephen Shore, as well as several vigorous manifestations on the West Coast started a powerful dialogue about color photography. Subway was an early and forceful statement about the possibilities in documentary vision. The impact on other photographers was profound. These large, bold and beautiful color images extracted directly from a world that was decidedly not beautiful were among the first to show us that contradiction. – Arthur Ollman