Description
“Looking through my Syracuse work is a walk down memory lane.
I was 34 in 1981 when Jeffrey Hoone the director of Light Work invited me to Syracuse for a month-long artist residency. The Light Work residency enables a photographer to shoot, develop, and print film, and, since I have never been very good at either developing or printing, I focused exclusively on photographing.
It was an exciting and important moment in my career as I was offered the chance of working with no interruption in a place that was new to me.”
– Bruce Gilden
An iconic street photographer with a unique style, Bruce Gilden was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946. He first went to Penn State University but he found his sociology courses too boring for his temperament and he quit college. Gilden briefly toyed with the idea of being an actor but in 1967, he decided to buy a camera and to become a photographer. Although he did attend some evening classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Bruce Gilden is to be considered substantially a self-taught photographer. 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 a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship (2013). Gilden has published 18 monographs of his work, among them: Facing New York, 1992; Bleus, 1994; Haiti, 1996; After The Off, 1999; Go, 2000; Coney Island, 2002; A Beautiful Catastrophe, 2004; Foreclosures, 2013; A complete Examination of Middlesex, 2014. In 2015, Gilden published Face, and Hey Mister Throw Me Some Beads! Gilden joined Magnum Photos in 1998. Gilden participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program in 1981.
