“Across the narrow Rue Lepic from the Moulin de La Galette, up eight flights of stairs under the thin roof of a Montmartre studio garret lived an old widow. She was the wife of Leon Fauche, an impressionist painter who was a close friend of Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir. Her husband died leaving her with a small military pension and 60 paintings. Montmartre changed but the widow stayed on. Each day she would go down to the streets crowded with tourists seeking the past and buy flowers to place under her husband’s self portrait. Then at twilight, as the weakening evening rays made a shadowy symbol of a long dead Paris through her studio window of the Moulin de la Galette, she was absorbed into darkness with her memories”
~ Esquire Magazine, October 1958
“All my photographs are portraits, self portraits because you can’t photograph someone without reflecting/echoing, like a bat sending out a signal that comes back to you. You get not only a picture of who you are photographing but you get a picture of yourself at the same time”
~ Bruce Davidson
Bruce was a 22 year old American draftee posted as an Army photographer to Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe. Through a fellow French soldier friend he was introduced to Madame Fauche and she was the subject of his first break-through photo essay. The work was first published in Esquire. Henri Cartier Bresson, one of the co-founders of Magnum Photo Agency, was impressed and Bruce was invited to join the agency and never looked back.
