Commencement will be held Saturday, May 21, 2011 at 4:30 p.m. at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Photographer Bruce Davidson, one of the most influential American photographers of the last half century, will accept an Honorary Degree, Doctor of Fine Arts, and serve as special speaker.
Andy Grundberg, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies, previously College photography department chair, reflects: Bruce Davidson’s career in photography is remarkable not only for its length of more than half a century but also - and more to the point - for the consistent quality and innovation of his work. My generation grew up with his pictures imbedded in our brains: the Brooklyn teen-agers in the late 1950s, the civil-rights movement, the East 100th Street project in the late 1960s, New York City subways. Even in his recent urban landscape photographs, Davidson has excelled at putting his sympathetic finger on the pulse of our times.”
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Bruce Davidson has been taking photographs since the young age of ten. After attending both the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University, Davidson met Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris while completing military service and became a member of Cartier-Bresson’s famed Magnum Agency in 1958. Davidson has worked as a photographer for LIFE Magazine and has had one-man exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Aperture Foundation, and the Foundation Cartier-Bresson in Paris.Davidson has received a number of grants and awards, including two grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Photography in 2004, and the Gold Medal Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Arts Club in 2007. In addition to his extensive exhibition features, Davidson’s photographs have appeared in numerous publications and his prints have been acquired by many major museums worldwide. He has also directed three films and has been featured in a variety of books, recently releasing Outside Inside, a three volume work spanning over fifty years of work. Davidson currently continues to lecture, conduct workshops and produce astounding images.
Annually, the Corcoran College of Art + Design honors an artist who has contributed significantly to the advancement of his or her discipline and to the collective body of related knowledge in the visual arts. Past recipients of this prestigious award include James Rosenquist, artist (2010), Tim Gunn, fashion expert (2009), Annie Leibovitz, photographer (2008), Phyllis Lambert, architect (2007), Sally Mann, photographer (2006), and Karim Rashid, designer (2005).
