BRUCE GILDEN
A STREET ICON
An iconic street photographer with a unique style, Bruce Gilden was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946 and now lives in Beacon. He first went to Penn State University but found the sociology courses too boring and quit. Bruce toyed with the idea of being an actor, but in 1967 he decided to buy a camera and become a photographer. Although he attended some evening classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Bruce is to be considered a self-taught photographer.
Right from childhood, Bruce has always been fascinated by street life and the complicated and fascinating motion it involves. This was the spark that inspired his first long-term personal projects, photographing in Coney Island and then during the Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Over the years Bruce has produced long and detailed photographic projects in New York, Haiti, France, Ireland, India, Russia, Japan, England and now in America. Since the seventies, his work has been exhibited in museum and art galleries all over the world and is part of many collections.
Bruce Gilden’s photographic style is defined by the dynamic accent of his pictures, his special graphic qualities, and his original and direct manner of shooting the faces of passers-by with a flash. His powerful images in black and white and now in colour have brought this Magnum photographer worldwide fame.
Bruce Gilden has received many awards and grants for his work, including National Endowments for the Arts fellowships (1980, 1984 and 1992), French “Villa Medicis Hors les Murs” grant (1995), grants from the New York State Foundation for the Arts (1979, 1992 and 2000), a Japan Foundation Artist Fellowship (1999) and in 2013 a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He has published 23 monographs of his work, 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; A complete Examination of Middlesex, 2014. In 2015, Bruce published Face, and Hey Mister Throw Me Some Beads! The commission he did for the French transport operator RATP, Un Nouveau Regard Sur la Mobilité Urbaine, was released in April 2016. It was followed by Only God Can Judge Me in 2018, Lost And Found in 2019, Palermo Gilden in 2020, and Cherry Blossom in 2021.
