Born in 1946, Bruce Gilden and his photography are inextricably linked. Hours as a child looking at tough guys on the bustling streets of Brooklyn from his second-story window shaped Gilden’s attraction to his photographic subjects, which he fondly refers to as “characters”.

After studying sociology at Penn State University, Gilden felt drawn to photography as a lifestyle after seeing Michelangelo Antonioni's classic 1966 film Blow Up and he decided that he, too, would become a photographer. In 1968, he bought himself a cheap Miranda camera and took a few evening classes at the School of Visual...