Bruce Gilden

Facing New York was Bruce's first major monograph and it remains one of the essential photobooks in the American canon. Published in 1992 and long out of print before its reissue, it captures New York at its most particular: the idiosyncratic, the hardened, the completely alive. Shot at arm's length with flash, the book is a full-contact portrait of a city and a people that Bruce understood from the inside. As curator Susan Kismaric put it, in his world no one is on the margins of centre stage. They are all star players. It is the book that set the terms for everything that followed.