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Bruce Davidson lives in a big, bright apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, with tall windows that light pours through, even on a rainy morning. Framed prints of his photographs are hanging on walls, stacked on couches, leaning against furniture on the floor. The eyes of Davidson’s subjects peer out from behind glass panes. Here, a New York City subway rider in 1980; there, a Brooklyn gang member in 1959. The faces, caught in everyday moments, command a visitor’s attention. They command the attention of Davidson, too, who on the way to give this visitor a tour of his workspace stops before each image to make an introduction, as though we were all guests at a party.
“This is a self-portrait I made in ’54, ’55,” Davidson says, pointing to a black-and-white image of himself, taken in the reflection of an ornate mirror. “This is Bobby,” he says, motioning to a print of Bobby Powers, the leader of the Brooklyn street gang the Jokers. “This is the nature of Paris,” he says, pausing before a black-and-white photograph of a plant. He then stops in front of an arresting, poster-size print of a woman riding a train in 1980, wearing an uncertain expression and a red carnation in her hair. “This is from the ‘Subway’ series,” Davidson says. “It's a dye-transfer color print.”
We walk down a long hall lined with yet more prints to his office, where two assistants are working and decades’ worth of contact sheets and negatives are stored in labeled boxes. (“East 100th Street.”) Standing here, amid all the labeled boxes, I am suddenly dumbstruck by something I already knew: the Freedom Riders, the subway riders, the residents of East 100th Street—one person took all those photographs.
It is easy to forget now how difficult it once was to get even a simple picture, how much technical skill was required, how much finality there was in the release of the shutter. To prepare himself to photograph his seminal “Subway” series, Davidson underwent a military fitness exercise program: “I knew I would need to train like an athlete to be physically able to carry my heavy camera equipment around in the subway for hours every day,” he has written. “Also, I thought that if anything was going to happen to me down there I wanted to be in good shape, or at least to believe that I was.” In his office, Davidson picks up a box labeled “Tools” and begins to riffle through the metal instruments inside. “I’m like a burglar,” he says. “A visual burglar.”
Davidson, 82, still burgles pictures, and though he no longer trails gang members, his process is no less painstaking, methodical, physical. From 2008 to 2013, he photographed the plants and trees of Los Angeles, a subject that had him hiking foothills at night, scouting boulder fields, and, at one point, rappelling down a ravine behind the Hollywood sign. To Davidson, the “Nature of Los Angeles” series is part of a triptych—with his studies of Central Park and the “Nature of Paris”—about flora in urban areas. But the series is also half of a diptych, next to his previous study of Los Angeles, captured more than four decades before, when Esquire sent Davidson to photograph the city in 1964. With this in mind, Steidl Books has just reissued both volumes, Los Angeles 1964 and Nature of Los Angeles 2008-2013, and it’s these two bodies of work I discuss with Davidson over coffee in his sun-filled living room.
You were on assignment for Esquire when you went to Los Angeles in 1964. What was the assignment?
Just to photograph. I guess they were looking for a writer. They sent me out there. Whoever sent me, sent me without any baggage. I had no point of reference. There wasn’t a writer. Previous work with Esquire and other magazines, they would send a writer out. I once did some photographs with Tom Wolfe, the writer. He was doing a story on countercultures, beach boys, surfers. I made photographs of a place called the Pump House.
I grew up there, in La Jolla.
Oh, you did? So you’re a surfer?
I am not. I won’t say that. But my brother is.
You know the culture. Probably the sexiest picture I ever made, I made of one of the Pump House girls running down the beach.
Do you still have that picture?
Yeah. It’s not in any publication. Maybe in The Pump House Gang. I remember some old-time beach guy. Tom and I crossed over this wall, and there were no surfers. This guy was a surfer in his head. He was illusory.
Right. So you were on assignment in L.A. and you didn’t have any baggage.
I didn’t have an agenda. For a kid who’s coming from New York, it was really surreal. If I can use that word. It was strange.
It’s so interesting to hear you say that because—
That’s your home.
That’s my point of reference, but I look at your pictures and I see the landscape differently. It’s familiar and surreal at the same time.
Yeah. In ’64, I followed whatever instincts I had to photograph the grayness there. The smog. I didn’t get into the music or film culture. Just street culture. Coming from New York, the street has a meaning. Sidewalks and street.
You write in Los Angeles 1964, “I walked up to strangers, framed, focused, and in a split second of alienation and cynicism, pressed the shutter button. Suddenly I had an awakening that led me to another level of visual understanding.” What was that new level of visual understanding?
The absurdity of city life. Of life. I sort of saw things within myself. Alienation. A certain adrift-ness. And it’s all with my camera. It’s all through my photography. That’s my one magic wand.
It’s a little bit like a love affair. The first love affair. You know? And actually I liked what I was doing during all those absurd days on the strip. There was a certain beauty in it for me. If beauty can be expressed in an artistic way.
You also write that people “were euphoric as they watered the desert.” I wondered what about it seemed euphoric to you.
Well, one of the pictures, there is a woman watering this sandy landscape. I mean, I would never see anything like that in Manhattan. They might dump their garbage on the sidewalk, but they’re not going to sweep it up.
Euphoria kind of means a dream state. It seemed to be like a dream state—a dream that went awry. And so I was photographing Los Angeles in that way. At the same time, I was working in the Deep South, where it was dangerous. And abusive. And so I just kept moving. Photography does that.
I love how in your photographs the palm trees and the cars are not just there—they’re looming, like they’re little beings.
They’re poems.
They’re poems?
They’re poems because they’re not indigenous. They’re brought in. I tried to find a palm tree that was about to die or just recently died. And no one could tell me where I would find one. I would ask hundreds of people. It’s like the palm tree is kind of invisible to them. And it shouldn’t live. Its roots are very shallow. You know? I think it’s because of the mantle of foliage and the top sort of keep it from blowing over.
So the palm tree itself—I began to become kind of buddy-buddy with those trees. People take them for granted, and then some people won’t sell palm tree seeds anymore because they don’t want any more of those palm trees laying around. But of course L.A. is so vast. You can have anything you want there if you say it. It’s little pockets of reality.
You write that the editors rejected the way that you saw the place, that you had an ironic perception of the place, which was rejected. Why do you think your perception of the place was rejected?
Maybe I didn’t go deeper into their perception of what L.A. is. There was always an eastern snobbery attached to L.A. That was Tinsel City. That was decadence. That was traffic. Highways. I don’t know what they had in mind. But it’s good that they gave back all my pictures, because they became kind of valuable after a while.
Can we look at some of these specific pictures?
Anything you like.
Was this one taken from a pier?
You know, I was trying to figure it out. I had come back from an assignment for Vogue in Leningrad. And when I was in Russia, I bought a lens that I couldn’t get in America. It was a Russian mirror optic. So in other words, it was like a 500-millimeter lens, but it was shrunk in a little box. I had that with me. I never could find that place again.
Maybe you were on a jetty.
Yeah, a jetty. But at a great distance, you know? Further than my eye could see. I had that lens and I was dying to use it. I had that lens in L.A. that was made with that mirror optic lens. I probably was pretty far away. I would have to look into it. It wasn’t a very good lens, but it was good enough.
What drew you back to Los Angeles to make this study 45 years later?
L.A. had changed. And so I had changed, too. I wanted to be left alone and explore the mountains with a 4x5 view camera. It was completely my own thing. It was great not to have to be with a Los Angeles gang.
I’d rather climb up on a ladder and climb down and photograph the back of the Hollywood sign—what the sign sees, which is desert. I had a very good assistant who helped me with a rope come down to a place where we were able to take the picture. We went there two or three different times. And what happened was the Los Angeles County Museum [of Art] gave me a letter to say I was on assignment for the museum. And that enabled me to just call and say, “We’re coming up. We’d like to come up tonight.” And they said, “Fine.”
I went back a number of times. Once with a ladder and flashlights. Walked up the road that goes to the top. Stayed there long enough that there was no more jet travel, jet planes, because they would streak my pictures. So we just stood there in the darkness. I was afraid that I’d step on a rattlesnake.
I had to find a motel that had big closets, because I needed to make a darkroom. I brought several yards of waterproof and completely opaque cloth. And little metal pushpins. Metal, not the plastic ones. Metal. They don’t show a hole. So we made this darkroom so that I could load and unload my day’s shoot. Typically what I would do, [my assistant] would pick me up at, say, 9:00. And we’d have a spot that we were going to photograph. Maybe it’s a boulder field just outside of L.A. It’s an hour’s drive just outside of L.A. And then in the afternoon we’d take a picture somewhere else of something. But we’d always be planning because of the traffic.
I’d go in [to the hotel] and I’d be exhausted. I actually would go to bed. And when I’d wake up at, say, 2:00 in the morning, I could load and unload. I didn’t want to load and unload the film when I was tired, because I’d have to keep everything clean. So that would happen every two weeks, and then I’d go home. That was a spiritual kind of thing for me. Because I was doing things very quietly, very contemplatively. I thought L.A. was absolutely, incredibly beautiful. And incredibly ugly. It’s not the great mountains of the West, you know.
You’re drawn to nature in the city. There’s something about the two butting up against each other that interests you?
Yeah, exactly. I’m interested in nature being where it wasn’t before. I never know when that will happen and whether it will become a creative thing. I just have to be right for it. I have to be ready for it. I have to want to understand something about it that would draw me in. I hate to be bored.
This interview has been edited and condensed.