In the thick of New York: Bruce Gilden raw and unseen
After recently moving house, Bruce Gilden discovered hundreds of contact
prints and negatives in his personal archives, from work undertaken in
New York, his native city, between 1978 and 1984. From these thousands
of images, most of which are new even to their author, Gilden has
selected around a hundred. Extending from the desire to revisit the work
of his youth, this historic archive constitutes an inestimable treasure.
An extraordinary New York is portayed here, revealing an unknown facet
of Gilden's oeuvre. With all the energy of a young man in his thirties,
and with no flash (before Gilden became famous for its almost systematic
use), Gilden launched an assault on New York in a visibly tense
atmosphere. In this extraordinary gallery of portraits, the
compositions--mostly horizontal--simmer with energy, bursting with the
most diverse characters, as though Gilden intended to include within the
frame everything that caught his eye.
In this book, we see the guiding tropes of the work that was to make
Gilden famous: sustained movement and tension, unrivalled spirit, and an
instinctive and irreverent affection for his subjects, perfectly in
cahoots with his city.
Bruce Gilden (1946) is a street photographer from Brooklyn, New
York. Over the years he has produced long and detailed photographic
projects in New York, Haiti, France, Ireland, India, Russia, Japan,
England and America. Gilden has published 18 monographs, among them
Facing New York (1992), Bleus (1994), Haiti (1996, European
Publishers Award for Photography); After the Off (1999), Go (2000),
Coney Island (2002), A Beautiful Catastrophe (2004), Foreclosures
(2013) and A Complete Examination of Middlesex (2014).
