Bruce Davidson / Zabriskie Point – the faces of America

Friday December 27th, 2024,  News

A new appointment at Spazio Antonioni recounts the meeting on the set of the film Zabriskie Point between the great photographer and one of the fathers of modern cinematography.

Having arrived in the United States in 1968 to portray a country that embodied the essence of his time, Michelangelo Antonioni chose Bruce Davidson as a set photographer on the set of Zabriskie Point: what unites them is the vocation to peer into the folds of reality without preconceptions, giving the gives the observer an enchanted and at the same time aware gaze.
Having joined the legendary Magnum agency in 1958, the American has demonstrated, since his first production, an extraordinary ability to delve into unfamiliar territories, bringing out, even from the most degraded subjects, a moral and aesthetic dignity. The reportage he dedicated to Zabriskie Point is considered one of the masterful services in the history of stage photography. The film offers a journey into the youthful universe of countercultures, but it is also an opportunity to explore a world full of lights and shadows in which still current traits can be recognised: «the mountains, the desert, the city, the cactus forests, but also the ghettos, the people who suffer, those who revolt, those who know and understand without the strength to revolt, those who are perhaps guilty” (Antonioni, 1969).

Davidson finds infinite material to give an unforgettable face to each of these facets. Portraits, views of Los Angeles, lunar landscapes of Death Valley restore the composite mosaic of a society where the myth of well-being and escape in the Wild West, violence and repression, the most futuristic architecture and an almost primordial nature coexist. Extending our gaze beyond the usual, the most common reality is revealed in its unexpected poetry and the loneliest landscape is sublimated into a work of art at the limits of abstraction. Another fascinating point of tangency between Antonioni and Davidson is precisely this affinity with visual research that challenges the properties of matter, be it the reflecting plane of a glass or the asperity of a desert rock.

Official site: https://artemoderna.comune.fe.it/1963