Bruce Gilden (*1946 in Brooklyn, New York) has spent the past 5½ decades roaming and working on the streets of countless cities—and has been an official Magnum photographer since 1998. From the beginning, he has directed his gaze toward the peripheries, the precarious realities that society prefers to overlook. For him, the subjects worthy of depiction are not stars, celebrities, or self-proclaimed influencers. He is interested in the “invisible,” the “underdogs” and “misfits”—those living on the margins of society, often noticed only by street workers or emergency services. But Bruce Gilden is no moralist.

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‍Bruce Gilden was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1946. After briefly studying sociology at Penn State University, he quit college and decided to become a photographer in 1967. Aside from taking a few evening classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Gilden broadly considers himself to be self-taught. Although Gilden started his career photographing on the sidewalks of New York City, where he grew up, he has since made significant bodies of work in Haiti, Japan, England, France, Ireland, India, and the USA. Along with his acclaimed personal projects, Gilden has worked on numerous commissions for clients including Louis Vuitton, RATP Parisian transportation system, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Balenciaga, and on assignments for Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue Homme and New York Times Magazine. Gilden is the recipient of many awards and grants for his work, including several National Endowments for the Arts fellowships, the New York State Foundation for the Arts, Japan Foundation Artist Fellowship and in 2013, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. Since the seventies, his work has been exhibited in museums and galleries all over the world. Bruce Gilden has published more than 30 books of his work, including Facing New York (1992), Coney Island, GO (1994), Face (1995), Lost and Found (1996), Cherry Blossom (1997), Black Country (1998), and most recently The Circuit (2000) and Haiti (2001). Gilden joined Magnum Photos in 1998. He lives in Beacon, New York.

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