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Interview with Bruce Davidson, The Kojo Nnamdi Show (WAMU/Chicago), November 2006 Q: You're on the streets of Chicago, wandering into Pentecostal churches, how did that initial roaming around, years ago, play out later in life? BD: I think that I was a born loner. My mother was a single parent, working in a torpedo factory in the Midwest, and I didn't like school. I felt very isolated. And so I could do both my reading and my writing at the same time, with a camera. Q: And that is what became the trajectory for the rest of your life. I want to go to 1961, because even as I look at the book "Time of Change", I think it was before you ever rode with the Freedom Riders that you got a job to shoot fashion models. And you got caught-up in that - it was quite glamorous. But at the time, your heart wasn't really in it, was it. BD: In 1959, I photographed a Brooklyn gang for a year. And when that was published, Alex Lieberman at Vogue asked me if I'd like to do fashion. He'd been told by Cartier-Bresson that I could do fashion because I could do gangs - it doesn't make a difference. So I began to do fashion to support other things I wanted to do. But my heart wasn't in it. The models were too tall and too sophisticated for me, and I'm a sloppy dresser.