Bruce Davidson: Los Angeles 1964

Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson is best known for capturing people in social adversity. In the 1960s he documented the Freedom Riders, whose famous bus journeys protested racial segregation; later he spent two years befriending and photographing people in a brutally poor Harlem block on East 100th Street; and in the 1970s his flash shone a light on the vibrant colours of the then unsafe underworld of the New York subway.

In 1964 Esquire sent him west to photograph…