Book Review: Lost & Found
Courtesy of Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos
Bruce Gilden’s Lost and Found is riddled with black and white images that, page after page, mimic the rhythm of the very New York City streets they illustrate; they’re fast-paced and crowded, capturing the people of Manhattan as they were on any given day in the late 70s and early 80s. Whether it is a woman donning a stern expression from the passenger seat of a car, engaging with the camera head-on, or a man walking and laughing beside his friend, ignoring the camera all together, Gilden’s subjects serve as snapshots of seemingly banal figures that he begs viewers to take a closer look at.
Courtesy of Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos
Courtesy of Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos
The images themselves are packed with possibilities. Gilden manages to wrangle as many people in a single frame as he can with just as many different expressions. There is no central focus, which suggests that everything in any one of these cramped photos is important. The viewer’s eye isn’t being directed to specific details, but rather to the scene as a whole. The camera is used to offer equal significance to a woman’s torso as it is to the large dog standing beside her.
Unlike some photographers, Gilden does not adopt the “fly on the wall” approach when photographing people-heavy scenes. The dog notices him and there’s a good chance the woman did, too. Despite her head being cut off by the frame, the angling of her body combined with its proximity to the photographer makes it nearly impossible to believe she could have ignored Gilden’s camera or his flash. This is especially true considering that all of his photos take on Robert Capa’s mantra, “If the photograph is not good enough, you’re not close enough.”
Although Gilden’s images fill the photos’ frames, the pictures themselves don’t fill the book’s pages. Each image sits on the far upper-right-hand side of each page and are almost-exclusively organized in a one-photo-per-spread manner. This makes for photos that resemble wide-angle polaroid snapshots without attacking the viewer with too information much at once. They breathe on the white, open pages.
Courtesy of Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos
Photographers like Larry Fink had an uncanny ability to capture social situations while maintaining an invisible presence. Gilden proves there is a charm to being out in the open, uncaring of who catches sight of him; it doesn’t matter who is looking through the lens or not. Everything is noteworthy and chaotic, just like New York. As he writes in one of the short vignettes that bookends Lost and Found, Gilden is wary of making anything that seems perfect. The images, much like the city they portray, are meant to reveal the multitude of imperfections that exist in any single scene. This quality is possibly what helps them feel timeless and alive.
These vignettes, which there are 13 of at the start of the book and one of at the end, read like Gilden himself is speaking. From exploring the ins and outs of making Lost and Found to digging into how he came to the photographic process in the first place, Gilden demonstrates a propensity to look inward just as much as he looks outward. In the process, he captures his own essence as a photographer alongside the essence of the city that inspires him and so many others.
Courtesy of Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos
