Bruce Davidson’s Circus Photos: Early Career Breakthrough

Bruce Davidson: His Early Years and The Circus (1958)

Bruce Davidson’s journey into photography began long before his Magnum years, rooted in childhood curiosity and a supportive family. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1933, he picked up his first camera at the age of ten.

His mother, recognizing his fascination, encouraged him wholeheartedly — even going so far as to build a makeshift darkroom in their basement. It was here that Davidson learned the alchemy of image-making, watching photographs emerge slowly in developer trays, a process that would shape both his technical skill and his lifelong sense of wonder.

His formal training came later, at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University, where he studied photography and painting. These experiences exposed him to both the craft and the art of the medium: at Rochester, he absorbed the discipline of photographic technique, while at Yale he encountered broader artistic traditions that sharpened his eye for composition and storytelling.

After a semester at Yale, Bruce Davidson was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned to the Signal Corps photo pool at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where he quickly moved from routine work to photographing for the post newspaper.

Bruce Davidson: Widow of Montmartre (1958)

Stationed near Paris with the Signal Corps, he created Widow of Montmartre (1958), a photo-essay on the widow of painter Leon Fauché, who had known Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, and Gauguin.

Published in Esquire in October 1958, the series caught the attention of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who befriended Davidson and helped usher him into Magnum Photos. By his mid-20s, Davidson had already developed a style marked by empathy for his subjects and a deep curiosity about the human condition.

Bruce Davidson: The Circus (1958)

In 1958, while freelancing and before he formally joined Magnum, Davidson embarked on one of his first major personal projects: The Circus.

Bruce Davidson Circus — *Trapeze Artist Circus 1958*
Gelatin silver print printed later
12 34 x 8 12 inches 324 x 216 cm image
14 x 11 inches sheet
Signed and negative notation 58 14 514 in pencil verso
Estimate $2000 $3000

He followed Clyde Beatty Circus, a small traveling circus, photographing not the spectacle in the ring but the lives of the performers behind the curtain.

His images of acrobats resting between shows, clowns applying makeup, and roustabouts setting up tents hinted at a fascination with the hidden, off-stage realities of performance — a theme that would recur throughout his career.

The photo here is amongst the Heritage Auctions being sold on 21 October 2025 with no reserve to benefit the Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency.

The image has been published in:
B. Davidson, Bruce Davidson Photographs, Agrinde/Summit Books, New York, 1978, pp.24-25;
Bruce Davidson, Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona & Aperture, NY, 2016, pl. 13, p. 78.

One of the most poignant outcomes was his intimate portrait series The Dwarf, centered on circus performer Jimmy Armstrong.

These photographs showed Davidson’s instinct to dignify people often marginalized or treated as curiosities, an instinct that became a foundation of his entire body of work.

Rather than portraying Armstrong as a spectacle, Davidson revealed the man behind the stage persona — capturing him putting on makeup in a dressing room, standing small yet commanding in front of his peers, or lost in moments of quiet reflection.

Like Brooklyn Gang and later East 100th Street, The Circus was built on empathy and proximity. Davidson didn’t stay in the bleachers; he embedded himself backstage, using his camera to erase the distance between subject and viewer.

The images are both tender and unflinching, highlighting the loneliness and humanity of someone often defined only by his difference. At a time when disability was rarely acknowledged outside of sideshow contexts, Davidson’s work stood apart: it was not an exploitation but an act of recognition.

Critical reception of the circus pictures was positive but modest at the time; Davidson was still a young freelancer, building his reputation through small publications and magazine submissions.

“I began to photograph the circus every day during the weeks it was there [Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey]… I first saw the dwarf standing outside the tent…His name was Jimmy, but he called himself “Little Man” and sometimes after the last show we went into a diner together where people snickered and laughed at us,” Bruce Davidson wrote.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is DavidsonCircus001.webp — *Jimmy Armstrong, Circus, 1958*
Gelatin silver print, printed later
6-3/8 x 9-3/4 inches (16.1 x 24.8 cm) (image)
11 x 14 inches (sheet)
Signed and negative notation 58-14-91/25 in pencil, verso.

This photo of Jimmy Armstrong is currently available at Heritage Auctions and will be sold without reserve on 21 October 2025 to benefit the Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency.

Unlike his later East 100th Street or Subway, the circus work didn’t immediately enter the canon, though it circulated in magazine features and impressed those in the photo world with its maturity. The photo essay was published in Esquire in 1960 under the title The Clown.

Decades later, however, the project was recognized as an early landmark in Davidson’s oeuvre. It was eventually published as a dedicated photobook — Circus (Aperture, 2007) — which gathered the series into a cohesive narrative for the first time.

By then, critics noted how the work foreshadowed Davidson’s career-long interest in the tension between surface spectacle and private reality, between public performance and hidden humanity.

“He was standing alone outside the tent smoking a cigarette. He was dressed in a tux and a top hat he held a small bouquet of paper flowers, and stood there pensively in the privacy of his inner thoughts. He seemed to know that it was the inner moment I was drawn to and not his clown face or physical appearance. We became friends, although we seldom spoke to one another,” Davidson recalled.

In Circus, Bruce Davidson draws readers beneath three midcentury big tops with photographs that are at once poetic, unflinching, and deeply humane. His images capture not only the fading spectacle of the circus itself but also what might be called the larger “human circus” — the grit, fragility, and wonder behind the show.

In 1958, at a three-ring tent performance, he scaled the rigging to photograph legendary acts like lion tamer Clyde Beatty and human cannonball Hugo Zacchini, yet his eye gravitated toward the everyday: roustabouts driving stakes, riggers tightening ropes, and the young woman costumed to ride an elephant in the “spec.” Most movingly, Davidson’s intimate portrait series of Jimmy Armstrong revealed both loneliness and resilience.

By 1965, photographing in a cavernous steel-and-concrete coliseum, Davidson’s perspective sharpened; his behind-the-scenes vision turned more critical, almost surreal. And in 1967, traveling with a one-ring Irish circus, he found renewed elegance and exuberance, including a face-to-face encounter with a trapeze artist that distilled the essence of the medium. Many of these images, long unseen, appear in the 2007 book Circus for the first time.

Within Magnum’s broader tradition, The Circus foreshadowed the kind of projects that would define Davidson’s career — long-term engagements with people living on society’s margins, approached with dignity rather than pity.

This approach influenced later photographers such as Diane Arbus, who also turned her attention to marginalized figures, though with a different, more confrontational style. Davidson’s work showed that documentary photography could be intimate without being voyeuristic, celebratory without ignoring hardship.

Looking back, The Circus was more than just a young photographer’s first foray into serious documentary work; it was the crucible in which Davidson’s empathetic eye was forged.

From a basement darkroom in Illinois to the tents of traveling performers, he was already learning to find dignity in unlikely places — a vision that would carry him through six decades of groundbreaking projects.

Our series on Bruce Davidson’s career …

Bruce Davidson’s career can be seen as a sequence of five great chapters — The Circus (1958), Brooklyn Gang (1959), East 100th Street (1966–68), Civil Rights (1961–65), and Subway (1980) — each one expanding the possibilities of what documentary photography could achieve. Together, they form a legacy defined not by spectacle, but by immersion and empathy.

Just as Cartier-Bresson sought universality in gesture, Davidson sought humanity in overlooked lives. The Circus thus became an early declaration of intent: that every life, no matter how sidelined, was worthy of the full seriousness of art and documentary.