Bruce Davidson’s Ode to Color Photography. Magnum Photos. Street gang, The Reapers, New York 1972. Four decades ago, in August 1972, LIFE magazine published an intimate and, for the time, remarkably even-handed article on the mounting problems associated with street gangs in New York and other cities around the country.
The piece focused on one gang in particular — the Reapers in the South Bronx — and featured a series of powerful color pictures by a young photographer named John Shearer. Shearer, only the second African-American staff photographer ever hired by LIFE — after Shearer’s mentor and friend, the great Gordon Parks — was uniquely qualified, among the magazine’s not terribly diverse stable of shooters, to capture the Reapers’ days and nights. But even he had trouble penetrating the gang’s wall of suspicion.
“I visited the neighborhood five or six times, without my camera,” Shearer recently told LIFE.com, “just so I could get a feel for that part of the South Bronx. Bruce Davidson: Thoughts On A Lifetime With Leica. Renowned photojournalist and Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson has been acclaimed for over half a century for his searing images of street gangs, circus performers and the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, all captured with a remarkable directness, truth and power that transcends the concept of style.
A friend of the legendary Henri Cartier-Bresson and a leading proponent of the classic black and white tradition of reportage, Davidson continues to evolve as an artist, recently embracing landscape photography and publishing a book of the color images he’s created over the years. His latest project on New York is still evolving, but he will definitely shoot it with a digital Leica in black and white and with a 28mm lens.
To gain a deeper understanding of the influences that shaped his long and illustrious career and how he sees his photographic mission going forward, we interviewed him at length. Q: Why do you like the Leica so much and why is it a great tool for what you do?