San Francisco, California - The Robert Koch Gallery is honored to present Bruce Davidson Time of Change: 1961-1965. These seminal photographs by renowned American photographer and long-time Magnum member Bruce Davidson chronicle a pivotal point in American history and document the struggle for racial equality and desegregation. This exhibition marks the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.

Davidson began working as a freelance photographer for Life Magazine in 1957 and became a full-time member of Magnum in 1958. In May of 1961 at the age of 28, Bruce Davidson traveled by bus with the anti- segregationist Freedom Riders from Montgomery, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi and chronicled what later became known as the Civil Rights Movement. The following year Davidson received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to further document the African-American struggle for equal opportunity throughout the country.

Time of Change recounts an era when public demonstrations, sit-ins, police brutality, and televised speeches captured the attention of the American public and audiences worldwide. Davidson photographed many of the central figures in the Civil Rights Movement including Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Ralph Abernathy, Rosa Parks, and John Lewis. His images depicted such historical events as the March on Washington with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the historic five-day march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in addition to documenting dramatic public protests, marches, and the socio-economic conditions of sharecroppers, cotton pickers, and the poor in the rural South.

Bruce Davidson currently lives and works in New York. His personal work has been published in numerous monographs, among them East 100th Street (Harvard University Press, 1970), Subway (Aperture, 1986), Central Park (Aperture, 1995), Brooklyn Gang (Twin Palms, 1998), The Civil Rights Movement 1961-1965 (St. Ann’s Press, 2002), Circus (Steidl, 2008), and a three-volume monograph Outside Inside chronicling his photographic career published by Steidl (2010). Davidson has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions including two oneperson shows at The Museum of Modern Art, one in 1966 for his series on the Civil Rights Movement and another in 1970 for his body of work East 100th Street. In 1982, the International Center of Photography exhibited his gritty photographs of the New York Metro and in 1999 showed his series Brooklyn Gang. He received the first ever photography grant from the National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1967 and has received numerous other awards including the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Photography (2004), and a Gold Medal Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Arts Club (2007). His photographs are in the collections of major American museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art among many others.

www.kochgallery.com