Kissing On A Rainy Beach: Bruce Davidson’s Photographs Of 1960s Britain

Couple Kissing on Street, London, England, 1960

Britain in the 1960s wasn’t all swinging, shagging and hair. There was condensation on the inside of windows, bomb sites that still looked like bomb sites and hadn’t been repurposed as car parks, trips to the seaside (now: ‘staycations’) to enjoy the damp, live on fudge and collect shards of glass from the sand, softened and sandblasted by the driving wind and rain; it was when ‘foreign’ meant former colonies, and people were only beginning to emerge from lives thwarted by poverty and war to coalesce around the telly for a diet of wall-busting popular culture; and everything was closed on Sundays. American Bruce Davidson photographed what he saw as he explored.

“I was free to encounter life. I was open and didn’t have any agenda. There was a certain sense of sky and fog, of another place. That’s why those pictures are delicate – and I was delicate too” – Bruce Davidson

More: ‘Bruce Davidson: A United Kingdom’ h/t: flashbak

Couples on Beach, Brighton, England, 1960

Two Nannies Pulling Buggies, England, 1960

Man and Woman Reflected in Car Window, London, England, 1960

Teenagers and Jukebox, Hastings, England, 1960

Wales, 1965

Wales, 1965

Couple on Beach, England, 1960

Boy Wearing a Mask, Wales, 1965

Wales, 1965

Child Riding in Toy Car, England, 1960

Scotland, 1960