JTF (just the facts): A total of 45 color and black-and-white photographs, framed in black and unmatted, and hung against colored walls on the third floor of the museum. The exhibition was curated by Jessica Jarl. (Installation shots below.)

The following works are included in the show (no detailed information on printing processes, dimensions, or edition sizes was provided):

• 25 color photographs, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023
• 20 black-and-white photographs, 1979, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1996, 2001, 2015
• 1 video interview with the artist

Comments/Context: If some science-minded person were to attempt to dissect street photography down to some incontrovertible laws or theorems, one of these principles would likely offer relative challenge or risk (r) as a function of distance (d). From far enough away (where d is large), the action on the streets is essentially abstracted, and a photographer can stand back and take it all in without the passersby even really knowing they are being photographed (r is very low or essentially zero). But up close, the situation is quite different, and the closer a photographer gets, the more likely he or she will be noticed or intrude into the subject’s space, and the more likely that invasion will provoke a reaction. Mathematically, the relationship might even be inversely geometric or exponential – as a photographer approaches the very closest and most intimate personal distances (as d goes to zero), without a predetermined understanding or communication, the likelihood of confrontation or conflict climbs fast (r increases to dangerous levels).

Perhaps this fundamental truth of street photography should be renamed Gilden’s Law, as if there is any street photographer from the past century who has systematically tested its limits, it’s Bruce Gilden. Now in his late 70s, Gilden has been out in the streets with his camera for nearly six decades, and he shows no signs of changing or slowing down. This succinct exhibition is a tips-of-the-waves survey of Gilden’s photographic career, boiling his many projects and interests down to a tidy sum of 45 pictures. With the brashness and swagger of an unapologetic native New Yorker, Gilden’s most memorable pictures routinely push on the boundaries of up close photographic engagement, roughly grabbing a slice of unguarded life from the human complexity found out in the streets.

Chronologically, this show begins in the late 1970s, in a central gallery space devoted to Gilden’s black-and-white imagery, most of the selections made in the 1980s and 1990s. The 1979 image of three New York couples in a black convertible is perhaps as far away (in terms of distance from his subject) as Gilden has worked – a few steps at most, with the man opening the car door well aware of his presence. But in the years that followed, Gilden closed that gap even further, getting right next to fleshy bathers and frazzled boardwalk crowds at Coney Island, noticing dramatic shouts, turned sidelong glances, and layered arrangements of heads in the streets of Haiti, and visually netting various classic New York characters, including a bug-eyed man with his daughter on his shoulders, a furtive man pushing a street cart, and a snappily-dressed man with two-toned shoes, a trilby, and his tie tucked into his pants. On through the ’90s, this pattern continued, with Gilden talking his way into encounters with Tokyo yakuza (including a famous image of one burly man lighting another’s cigarette), but seemingly always returning to the bustling streets of New York, blasting society women with flash (giving one a fearsome glow) and capturing a range of passing split second expressions, from open mouthed horror to scowling disapproval.

The second half of this show then jumps forward to color works Gilden has made in roughly the last decade. Layered stories and contexts have largely been left behind (aside from a small group of recent images of Brooklyn bikers) for a step even closer to his subjects, where Gilden brings his camera inside the definitional boundary of personal space to make perilously intimate images of faces. The installation is a parade of mercilessly seen personalities and identities, their faces and bodies printed at much larger-than-life-sized, each permission-granted exchange like a harshly lit and invasive examination.

In contrast to the restrained precision of August Sander’s taxonomy of the people of the 20th century, Gilden’s people of the 21st century are seen with a kind of manic immediacy, which often borders on the unflinchingly brutal. It’s hard to articulate what it feels like to be visually assaulted by so many huge faces in an installation like this one – it’s a wash of intensity that often feels overwhelming, with my own rapt attention mixed with something like sympathetic revulsion. Polarizing is hardly the word for these photographs – the pictures demand engagement, but that process isn’t always pleasant. It hardly matters whether the subjects are sex workers from Mexico or kids at the Iowa State Fair – Gilden doesn’t flinch from examining every pore, wrinkle, blemish, and scar, with smears of makeup, bloody injuries, tattoos, jowls, and grizzled visages documented in exacting detail. Is it possible to identify a face as originating in Philadelphia, as opposed to Cleveland, or Miami, or even England? Perhaps, but each face is like a map of its own, with a story that Gilden has found worth isolating, amplifying, and retelling.

Try as we might to dismiss these Gilden portraits as deliberately egregious provocations or outright visual meanness, when we then turn back to the line of celebrated portrait photographers we have revered over time for their ability to get their portrait subjects to truly let their guard down, it gets somewhat harder to push Gilden’s work aside. As seen in a short interview loop, Gilden is a classic New York talker, and his brusque style must have resonated with the people in these pictures, or they would have never subjected themselves to his often unflattering gaze. Like them or not, Gilden’s photographs have added to the collective library of innovative photographic portraiture. And as I stood with these images longer, I started to wonder about whether the fact that he has so consistently pressed exactly on our points of discomfort is partly a result of our own unwillingness to wrestle with certain human realities. “Good” or “not good” hardly seem like modifiers that can encompass these pictures, and maybe that’s exactly the point.

If we can somehow distance ourselves from the tragedy found in a few too many of Gilden’s faces, there may be a path forward to better understanding how Gilden has methodically pushed photography to its extremes. Few street photographers have extended the medium with such vibrancy and vitality, and there is something to be said for taking the medium and pushing it so far outside its comfort zone that it feels like it might break. I actually think that breaking point is what Gilden has been aiming for across his entire career. This sampler show gives us some evidence of that line of thinking, but its dramatic darkened-room installation encourages us to feel rather than think. I left the show wondering more about that impulse to “break” established rules, and whether if we looked at Gilden’s work with a more scholarly eye, we might find a deeper legacy of attempted artistic revolution hiding behind his aggressive New York hustle.

Collector’s POV: Bruce Gilden is represented by Magnum Photos (here), where he became a member in 1998. His work has very little secondary market presence, so gallery retail remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.