Local hero: Bruce Davidson's photographs captured Harlem street life in the 1960s

Local hero: Bruce Davidson's photographs captured Harlem street life in the 1960s In 1956, Bruce Davidson, who'd taken his first pictures at the age of 10, was drafted into the US Army. For many, Davidson's deepest influence on the story of photography was in his portrayal of the inhabitants of East 100th Street, Harlem, New York. Davidson used an old-fashioned, large-format camera on a tripod with a dark cloth for this project. The images are tonally rich and sharp, and there is a knowing irony in his use of an essentially 19th-century technology to represent the Victorian living conditions of Harlem. His first critical acclaim, which underpinned his award of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961 and his 1966 solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, stemmed from his portrayal in 1961 of Brooklyn gangs, and principally 'The Jokers', which occupies one volume of Black g community, in which the viewer is given a pungent sense of the emotional gamut of youth, and the good and bad luck that flavoured these young lives. The ethos of Magnum is tangible in Davidson's work, with its narration of real lives and events well beyond the constraints of a magazine's page layout, or the stylisation of a newspaper's front-page image. Davidson's contribution to photography is immense, and the essence of it is captured in the publication this month of Black that he's undertaken over the past five years of editing and printing his archive has been an act of taking responsibility for how his contribution to photography is remembered. Davidson's intelligent revisiting of his archive and practical excitement at the alchemy of photography and its capacities to tell enduring stories is what makes him one of the most important photographers of our age. Local hero: Bruce Davidson's photographs captured Harlem street life in the 1960s Trade News selected by Local Linkup on 08/04/2012