2010 EF photographer Bruce Gilden featured on Time LightBox
BRUCE GILDEN
TIME LIGHTBOX FEATURE
Bruce Gilden, 2010 EF photographer, was featured on Time LightBox.
Gilden got started on the topic in 2008, as part of a Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund effort to revisit a 1960s project; the idea was that President Obama might present a parallel to President Kennedy, and that it was a good time to look at the state of the country. Gilden intended to go to Florida and photograph the people of Miami Beach, but his wife suggested that foreclosures might be a more appropriate subject. “I didn’t even know really what foreclosure was,” he remembers. “But I went down and did foreclosures, and as I started to do it I started to get annoyed, because I saw it’s like legalized thievery.”He subsequently began to study up on the topic—he says he has now read 20 books on the topic, throws around words like “tranche” and can cite foreclosure rates by state—and the annoyance turned to anger. That anger became the message of the photographs. “I’m not on the one-percent side,” he says.
Gilden’s Foreclosures with be featured at Photoville, a free pop-up photo village. Photoville opens this Friday, June 22.