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Central Park

Name: Central Park
Author: Elizabeth Barlow Rogers,Marie Winn
ISBN: 9780893816254

by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Marie Winn

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Overview

Renowned as an intrepid explorer of the urban terrain, and a member of Magnum Photos, Bruce Davidson has challenged himself in a remarkable new way, by taking on the visual and metaphorical scope of Central Park. Always compassionate, often idiosyncratic, this work reveals a sublime and at times transcendent vision. Davidson seems as comfortable with a wedding, a landscape, or a roller skater as he does with Central Park's more permanent residents, a newborn bird or a man seeking refuge on a cold winter's night. Davidson has intuitively discovered a multiplicity of mysteries, eccentricities, and characters that together reflect the vibrant and complex city of which the park is the heart and soul. At the same time, Bruce Davidson's Central Park becomes a metaphor for a larger human experience.

With text by author, journalist, and translator Marie Winn, a preface by writer and former Central Park Conservancy director Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, and Davidson's own anecdotal reflections, Central Park provides an expansive view of this wonderfully intricate and varied space.

Renowned as an intrepid explorer of the urban terrain, Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson has taken on a project of unparalleled visual and metaphorical scope in Central Park, revealing a humane, democratic haven of breathtaking beauty and ecological secrets--a site for wondrous adventures. 60 photos. Traveling exhibition.

About the Author, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers,Marie Winn

Bruce Davidson

Bruce Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for Life Magazine and joined Magnum Photos in 1958. As a documentary photographer, he produced two photo essays, "Brooklyn Gang" and the "Freedom Rides." He photographed the Civil Rights Movement, including a rally in Harlem, Ku Klux Klan cross burnings, and the marches in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. In 1966 he won the first photography grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to document East 100th Street in Harlem; this work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art.

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Editorials

Brad Hooper

Out-of-town visitors may think that Central Park is off-limits, that it is full of, not necessarily lions and tigers and bears, but at least bandits, which may be true at 3 a.m.; however, in daylight hours, Manhattanites of all persuasions flock to this beloved green space, to make love, jog, watch and be watched, lie scantily clothed in the sun, or, unfortunately in some cases, set up housekeeping under a cardboard roof. Activities find certain limitations in winter, but some of the most arresting shots in this black-and-white album of what people do in Central Park, by an exceptionally talented and much-exhibited photographer, were taken against winter's blanket of snow. No chamber-of-commerce glorifying of city life here, but no unfair disparagement of it, either--Davidson's sharply focused photographs speak of a love of the diversity of human preoccupation and of the wonderful irony inherent in the very fact of Central Park's existence: that woods and meadows and ponds occur in the midst of one of the world's most intense urban areas. Any reader with an eye for evocative photography, particularly of the nuance of texture that only the black-and-white medium can achieve, will enjoy Davidson's photos.