Bruce Gilden: 8 Days in Napoli

Photography monograph for Leica Gallery
Text and interview by Max Blagg

From Max Blagg’s introduction:
Bruce Gilden is a visual artist who sees things with a poet’s eye, carving beauty out of scenes and subjects that others might find intimidating, risky or simply repulsive. Never a detached observer, Gilden actively seeks out the confrontations and characters that fit his vision, faces that reveal more life than they conceal, detailed evidence of grief and joy, hunger and loss. A roadmap of many and various lives, the “bubukles and whelks and knobs and flames o’ fire,” on physiognomies shaped by whatever damage, debauchery and destruction they have lived through. Images originally inspired by the journeyman mugshots of criminal suspects made by cops in a thousand lockups, whose chance revelations of character and the ‘anxiety of flesh,’ first shaped Gilden’s own approach to portraiture.

84 pages
9 x 12 inches