Bruce Gilden: Lost and Found

After recently moving house, Bruce Gilden discovered hundreds of contact prints and negatives in his personal archives, from work undertaken in New York, his native city, between 1978 and 1984.
The first images of the North American photographer and member of the Magnum Photos agency published in this book for the first time; among the thousands of original images, most of which are new, even for their author, Bruce Gilden has selected around a hundred.

An extraordinary New York is portrayed here, revealing an unknown facet of Gilden’s oeuvre. With all the energy of a young man in his thirties, and with no flash (before Gilden became famous for its almost systematic use), Gilden launched an assault on New York in a visibly tense atmosphere. In this extraordinary gallery of portraits, the composition simmers with energy, bursting with the most diverse characters, as though Gilden intended to include within the frame everything that caught his eye.

This historic archive, resurfacing forty years later, portrays a timeless New York, his native city, and reveals a little-known chapter of the artist’s work: images taken without a flash and almost exclusively horizontally. The interview accompanying the photographs, conducted by Sophie Darmaillacq, explores the photographer’s development through his personal background but also his influences and relationship with others. 

Lost & Found already reveals the elements characteristic of Bruce Gilden’s images: sustained movement and tension, as well as an instinctive and irreverent affection for his subjects – in perfect complicity with his city.
The book launch events with Bruce Gilden took place during Paris Photo last Thursday 7 November 2019.

About the author

Acclaimed street photographer with a unique style, Bruce Gilden was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946. After briefly studying sociology at Penn State University and toyed with the idea of being an actor, he decided in 1967 to buy a camera and to become a photographer.

Besides taking a few evening classes at the School of Visual Arts, Gilden is predominantly self-taught. Even as a child, he has always been fascinated by life on the streets and its complicated and fascinating rhythms, and 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.

Since then, Bruce Gilden has continued to focus on strong characters and to apply Robert Capa’s mantra to his own work: “if the picture isn’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” Over the years he has produced long and detailed photographic projects in New York, Haiti, France, Ireland, India, Russia, Japan, England, and now in America. Gilden has published 21 monographs of his work.

Bruce Gilden’s work has been exhibited widely around the world and is part of many permanent collections such as MoMA, New York; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and the Getty Museum. In 2016, his most recent work in color was exhibited in a group show, Strange and Familiar, Britain as revealed by international photographers at the Barbican Art Museum in London, and in 2019 in the exhibition This Landat Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco.
Already the recipient of numerous grants and awards, Bruce Gilden became a Guggenheim Fellow in 2013. He joined Magnum Photos in 1998.