Bruce Gilden (born 1946) is an American street photographer. He is best known for his candid close-up photographs of people on the streets of New York City, using a flashgun. [1] [2] He has had various books of his work published, has received the European Publishers Award for Photography and is a Guggenheim Fellow. Gilden has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1998. He was born in Brooklyn, New York.
Gilden was born in Brooklyn, New York. While studying sociology at Penn State, he saw Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blowup in 1968. Influenced by the film, he purchased his first camera and began taking night classes in photography at the School of Visual Arts of New York. Fascinated with people on the street and the idea of visual spontaneity, Gilden turned to a career in photography. [3] His work is characterized by his use of flash photography. He has worked in black and white most of his life, but he began shooting in color and digital when he was introduced to the Leica S camera as part of Magnum's Postcards From America project. [4] Gilden has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1998.
His first major project was of people at Coney Island. [5] He has photographed people on the streets of New York, [1] Japan's yakuza mobsters, homeless people, prostitutes, and members of bike gangs between 1995 and 2000. According to Gilden, he was fascinated by the duality and double lives of the individuals he photographed. [6] He has also photographed rural Ireland and horseracing there, as well as voodoo rituals in Haiti.
Gilden is the subject of the documentary film Misery Loves Company: The Life and Death of Bruce Gilden (2007). [7]
Gilden has described the way he photographs as “flash in one hand and jumping at people”. [8] Sean O'Hagan, reviewing Gilden's Face (2015) in The Guardian wrote that "his style seems to work against any intention to humanise his subjects." [8] Contemporary American photographer Joel Meyerowitz has this to say about Gilden: “He’s a fucking bully. I despise the work, I despise the attitude, he’s an aggressive bully and all the pictures look alike because he only has one idea—‘I’m gonna embarrass you, I’m going to humiliate you.’ I’m sorry, but no.” [9]
Gilden's work is held in the following collections:
Martin Parr is a British documentary photographer, photojournalist and photobook collector. He is known for his photographic projects that take an intimate, satirical and anthropological look at aspects of modern life, in particular documenting the social classes of England, and more broadly the wealth of the Western world.
Magnum Photos is an international photographic cooperative owned by its photographer-members, with offices in Paris, New York City, London and Tokyo. It was founded in 1947 in Paris by photographers Robert Capa, David "Chim" Seymour, Maria Eisner, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, William Vandivert, and Rita Vandivert. Its photographers retain all copyrights to their own work.
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French artist and humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment.
Gilles Peress is a French photographer and a member of Magnum Photos.
Bruce Landon Davidson is an American photographer, who has been a member of the Magnum Photos agency since 1958. His photographs, notably those taken in Harlem, New York City, have been widely exhibited and published. He is known for photographing communities that are usually hostile to outsiders.
Alec Soth is an American photographer, based in Minneapolis. Soth makes "large-scale American projects" featuring the midwestern United States. New York Times art critic Hilarie M. Sheets wrote that he has made a "photographic career out of finding chemistry with strangers" and photographs "loners and dreamers". His work tends to focus on the "off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America" according to The Guardian art critic Hannah Booth. He is a member of Magnum Photos.
Jim Goldberg is an American artist and photographer, whose work reflects long-term, in-depth collaborations with neglected, ignored, or otherwise outside-the-mainstream populations.
Christopher Horace Steele-Perkins is a British photographer and member of Magnum Photos, best known for his depictions of Africa, Afghanistan, England, Northern Ireland, and Japan.
Stuart Franklin is a British photographer. He is a member of Magnum Photos and was its President from 2006 to 2009.
Gregory Halpern is an American photographer and teacher. He currently teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology and is a nominee member of Magnum Photos.
Alex Majoli is an Italian photographer known for his documentation of war and conflict. He is a member of Magnum Photos. Majoli's work focuses on the human condition and the theater within our daily lives.
Alex Webb is a photographer who makes vibrant and complex color photographs. He has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1979.
Sergio Larraín Echeñique was a Chilean photographer. He was a member of Magnum Photos during the 1960s. He is considered the most important Chilean photographer in history, making street photography, often of street children, using "shadow and angles in a way few had tried before."
Dewi Lewis is a Welsh publisher and curator of photography.
Jeff Mermelstein is an American photojournalist and street photographer, known for his work in New York City.
Peter van Agtmael is a documentary photographer based in New York. Since 2006 he has concentrated on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their consequences in the United States. He is a member of Magnum Photos.
Carolyn Drake is an American photographer based in Vallejo, California. She works on long term photo-based projects seeking to interrogate dominant historical narratives and imagine alternatives to them. Her work explores community and the interactions within it, as well as the barriers and connections between people, between places and between ways of perceiving. her practice has embraced collaboration, and through this, collage, drawing, sewing, text, and found images have been integrated into her work. She is interested in collapsing the traditional divide between author and subject, the real and the imaginary, challenging entrenched binaries.
Matt Stuart (1974) is a British street photographer. He was a member of the In-Public street photography collective. Stuart also works as an advertising photographer.
Stephen McLaren is a Scottish photographer, writer, and curator, based in Los Angeles. He has edited various photography books published by Thames & Hudson—including Street Photography Now (2010)—and produced his own, The Crash (2018). He is a co-founder member of Document Scotland. McLaren's work has been shown at FACT in Liverpool as part of the Look – Liverpool International Photography Festival and in Document Scotland group exhibitions at Impressions Gallery, Bradford and at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. His work is held in the collection of the University of St Andrews.
Paul Hart is a British landscape photographer. His work “explores our relationship with the landscape, in both a humanistic and socio-historical sense”. His books include Truncated (2009), Farmed (2016), Drained (2018) and Reclaimed (2020), all published by Dewi Lewis. In 2018 he was awarded the inaugural Wolf Suschitzky Photography Prize (UK) by the Austrian Cultural Forum, London.
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Museum number: PH.670-1987 Gallery location: Prints & Drawings Study Room, level H, case X, shelf 936 20thC; Gilden Bruce, Hitting the deck,(aka The Boxer)