East 100th Street, photographed by Bruce Davidson from 1966 through 1968 on a block between First and Second Avenues in East Harlem, portrays residents’ domestic, social, and public lives.
The project's central tension comes from a resident's distinction between what outsiders called a "ghetto" and what residents knew as "home." Davidson examines poverty and deteriorating housing alongside kinship, work, education, religion, music, political consciousness, disability, and neighborhood organizing during a period of active Puerto Rican community advocacy. Introduced to families through the Metro North Association and supported by a $12,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant, he hoped the photographs would give residents a public face and support appeals to city officials. Encounters involving refusals, conditions, and suspicion also make representation itself part of the subject.
Formal family portraits and carefully arranged individuals appear in bedrooms, kitchens, bars, basements, and on stoops, rooftops, and rubble-filled lots. Chicken-wire-covered windows, scrubbed linoleum, religious images, an American flag, and a portrait of John F. Kennedy locate people within layered domestic and civic spaces. Horizontal and vertical compositions move between tidy interiors and damaged surroundings, while direct poses and sharply rendered tonal detail create a deliberate, face-to-face mood rather than the fleeting effect of candid street photography.
Davidson used a tripod-mounted bellows view camera, generally identified as 4 x 5, with electronic flash, then produced gelatin-silver prints. The cumbersome apparatus slowed each sitting and made the act of photographing visible, encouraging negotiated collaboration. He returned repeatedly, sometimes waiting weeks to assemble a family, and distributed about 2,000 prints to residents.
An extensive feature appeared in the German magazine du in 1969. Harvard University Press published the 123-photograph book in September 1970 alongside a Museum of Modern Art exhibition selected by John Szarkowski. An American Federation of Arts tour reached the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1971-72. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston later acquired 43 related prints and exhibited them in 2013.
