NEW YORK, NY – The Jewish Museum will present Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side: Photographs by Bruce Davidson from September 16, 2007 through February 3, 2008. This exhibition features 40 intimate and moving photos spanning the years 1957 to 1990. Included are selections from Davidson’s Garden Cafeteria portfolio; his portraits of the author and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), the most revered Yiddish writer of the twentieth century; and a series of photographs of Lower East Side residents. Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side: Photographs by Bruce Davidson was organized by the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts.

Longtime neighbors and friends, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bruce Davidson collaborated in 1972 on a humorous and surreal film, Isaac Singer’s Nightmare and Mrs. Pupko’s Beard, based on a story by Singer. The film is included in the exhibition. During and after production, Davidson photographed Singer around the Upper West Side, and then shifted his focus from the street into the apartment and even the bedroom of the renowned author. These portraits depict Singer as nattily dressed and surrounded by papers or jotting in a notebook. But Davidson also reveals the famous writer dining in bed, or in extreme close-up.

The following year, in 1973, Davidson took a series of photographs on the Lower East Side. He created a black-and-white portfolio titled The Garden Cafeteria, depicting denizens of the East Broadway restaurant that Singer went to regularly on his way to drop off his work at the nearby offices of The Jewish Daily Forward. Davidson was drawn to the Garden Cafeteria by the community of mostly elderly European-born Jews who gathered there. Later, in 1990, Davidson returned to the neighborhood to photograph local merchants, rabbis, and storefronts on Essex and Orchard Streets, recording how the neighborhood and its residents had evolved.

 Of the experience of photographing Singer, Davidson said, “His world became a world I could explore, uncover, and enjoy. Isaac Singer allowed me to touch something I had never been able to reach before.”

Over the course of a fifty-year career, photographer Bruce Davidson has been known for chronicling life on the streets of such places as Paris, East Harlem and the Deep South. He has a special relationship with the Lower East Side of New York City, where he has taken photographs since 1957. Davidson is drawn to street life and to exploring phenomena of social and political importance such as the civil rights movement.

Bruce Davidson began photography at the age of ten in Oak Park, Illinois. While attending Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University he continued to further his knowledge and develop his passion. He was later drafted into the army and stationed near Paris where he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the four founders of the renowned international co-operative photography agency, Magnum Photos. When he left military service in 1957, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for Life magazine and in 1958 became a full member of Magnum Photos. From 1958 to 1961 he created such seminal bodies of work as The Dwarf, Brooklyn Gang, and the Freedom Rides. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 to photograph what became a profound documentation of the civil rights movement in America. In 1963 the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his early work in a solo show. In 1967 he was awarded the first grant for photography form the National Endowment for the Arts, having spent two years bearing witness to the dire social conditions on one block in East Harlem.

This work was published by Harvard University Press in 1970 under the title East 100^th Street and was later republished and expanded by St. Ann’s Press. The work became an exhibition that same year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1980 he captured the vitality of the New York metro’s underworld that was later published in his book Subway and exhibited at the International Center for Photography in 1982. In 1992 he photographed the landscape and layers of life of Central Park. Bruce Davidson is a 1998 recipient of an Open Society Institute Individual Fellowship to return to East 100^th Street and was awarded the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Photography. Classic bodies of work from his 50-year career have been extensively published in monographs and are included in many major public and private fine art collections around the world. He continues to photograph and produce new bodies of work. His most recent book is Circus (2007).

Isaac Bashevis Singer produced fiction serialized in The Jewish Daily Forward as well as political commentary, popular journalism, and advice columns under assumed names. Beginning with The Family Moskat (1950), his stories and novels were translated and published in English, bringing him to a world-wide audience. His dozens of books include Satan in Goray (1955), Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories (1957), The Magician of Lublin (1960), The Spinoza of Market Street and Other Stories (1961), Enemies: A Love Story (1972), A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1973), Shosha (1978), Yentl the Yeshiva Boy (1983), Shadows on the Hudson (1998), and also books for children and plays. Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978.

Accompanying the exhibition is a book of the same title co-published by the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College and University of Wisconsin Press in 2004. The 127-page paperback volume includes 45 photographs, critical essays, an interview with the photographer, Singer’s unpublished introduction to The Garden Cafeteria and his short story, “The Beard,” and is available for $26.95 softcover at The Jewish Museum’s Cooper Shop.

About The Jewish Museum

The Jewish Museum was established on January 20, 1904 when Judge Mayer Sulzberger donated 26 ceremonial art objects to The Jewish Theological Seminary of America as the core of a museum collection. Today, The Jewish Museum maintains an important collection of 26,000 objects – paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, archaeological artifacts, ceremonial objects, and broadcast media. Widely admired for its exhibitions and educational programs that inspire people of all backgrounds, The Jewish Museum is the preeminent institution exploring the intersection of 4,000 years of art and Jewish culture.

Visit the Museum’s Web site at http://www.thejewishmuseum.org or call 212.423.3200. The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92^nd Street, Manhattan.