Masters of Photography (13/15)

As Official Photography Partner of Photokina 2016, Leica will be staging the Masters of Photography exhibition at the world photography trade fair.

Every day up until the opening of the Photokina on September 20, we will be presenting one of the pictures series. Today it is American Made by Bruce Gilden.

The motifs of his pictures have a polarising effect: his mercilessly hard and confrontational street photography has made Bruce Gilden one of the most spectacular and often discussed photographers in the USA. “In my long career of photographing people, I have never been interested in banal faces. They’ve always had to be standing out from the rest.” For his most recent, much discussed Faces project, Gilden has once again radicalised the standard. Never before has he been so close to his protagonists, and the extremely frontal perspective is the reason why he not only took more time for the series, but also asked those he portrayed permission to do so. Consequently, despite their unadorned ruthlessness, the images are the result of a consensus and a very short but intense moment of interaction.