Bruce Gilden

Why These? assembles 45 photographs personally selected by Bruce Gilden, tracing the evolution of his unmistakable visual language. From the immediacy of Coney Island to the dense streets of Tokyo, Gilden’s images are defined by radical proximity – faces at point-blank range, gestures suspended in confrontation. The exhibition follows his shift from stark black-and-white to the chromatic intensity of digital color, revealing a practice that is both anthropological and unapologetically present.

About the artist

Bruce Gilden is a visual artist who sees things with a poet's eye, carving beauty out of scenes and subjects that others might find intimidating, risky or simply repulsive. Never a detached observer, he actively seeks out the confrontations and characters that fit his vision, faces that reveal more life than they conceal, detailed evidence of grief and joy, hunger and loss. A roadmap of many and various lives, on physiognomies shaped by whatever damage, debauchery and destruction they have lived through. ​

Gilden has walked and worked the streets of innumerable cities for the past five decades, as a certified Magnum photographer since 1998. At seventy-seven, more acutely aware of the physical demands of his trade, and the proximity of impending mortality he has refined the lifelong accumulation of photographic knowledge into a tribal elder's wisdom. ​