As a teen coming of age, Bruce Davidson can remember his sense of color taking root in 1949. While working at a local camera store during his senior year of high school, Davidson was introduced to Al Cox Jr., a commercial photographer working in the town of Oak Park, Illinois. Cox invited Davidson to assist him with various tasks, including the painstaking process of making color prints in the darkroom. “It left an indelible impression on me at the age of seventeen,” Davidson wrote in Bruce Davidson: In Color, just re-released for the first time in five years.
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After graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Davidson enrolled in the Design Department at Yale University in the 1950s where he met artist and educator Josef Albers, one of the foremost color theorists of the twentieth century. “His demonstrations had an impact on me at the time but I was not yet committed to color as a way of life,” Davidson wrote.
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After a two-year stint in the U.S. Army, Davidson returned to New York in 1957 to resume his photography practice. Drawn to the Old World atmosphere of the Lower East Side, Davidson discovered among the pushcart vendors, tailors, and merchants a feeling of connection and community among people like his grandfather, a Polish émigré who arrived in the United States at the age of 14. Here he began making color photographs of the city as it was then — a world of immigrants who brought their culture to the streets of New York.
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