DAVIDSON, Bruce | Six photographs of Nathan Ackerman

Five 8 x 10” silver gelatin prints [one triplicate]; one 8 x 6” silver gelatin print; photostamp on verso; autograph annotations on verso; in mylar sleeve.

Bruce Davidson began taking photographs at the age of ten in Oak Park, Illinois and would go on to attend the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University. He was later drafted into the army and stationed near Paris where he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the founders of the Magnum Photos.

When he left military service in 1957, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for LIFE magazine and in 1958 became a full member of Magnum. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 and created a profound documentation of the civil rights movement in America. In 1963, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his early work in a solo show.

The subject of these portraits, Nathan Ackerman, was born on November 22, 1908, in Russia. He received his BA in 1929 followed by an MD from Columbia and conducted his internship at both the Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, New York and the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.

Ackerman is considered one of the pioneers of family psychology. He was originally trained as a classical psychoanalyst, and he researched psychosexual phases of development with a strong emphasis on how these phases affect the development of personality and character. He later became interested in incorporating psychodynamic insights into a group therapy setting and he began advocating for the role of the family in therapy after World War II.