Bruce Davidson’s LA 1964
The photographer's unique take on the city
Bruce Davidson is known for taking photographs of people living their lives in hostile atmospheres. He chronicled the movement of the 1960s Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who rode buses into the deep south to protest segregation. He did a series capturing the people who dared to ride the crime-ridden New York City subway of yesteryear. But in 1964, Esquire sent Davidson on a far less perilous mission. They wanted him to simply go photograph Los Angeles. Davidson roamed the streets, capturing moments from a typical day in the city—a man ordering through a microphone at a drive-thru restaurant, bodybuilders at the beach—but his work didn’t pass muster with the magazine. “The editor did not understand the pictures at all,” said Davidson. “He gave them back to me and they stayed in my drawer until 1978.” His series was finally published as the book Bruce Davidson: Los Angeles 1964 by Steidl in 2015. Here are some of the highlights of the collection.
