When I first saw Bruce Davidson`s photographs of a Brooklyn Gang I didn`t immediately realise what I was really looking at. They looked like they were parts of some fashion magazine`s editorial inspired by the style of the `50s or like photo stills from a cool movie about the rock`n`roll era. I was stunned to find out that the boys and girls photographed were true characters, real gang members of a `50s Brooklyn gang photographed in their everyday life.
I never would have guessed that these seductive and intriguing photos had an even more intriguing story behind them. Read the following article to find out for yourselves...:
Reposted from www.guardian.co.uk:
"...In 1959, there were about 1,000 gang members in New York City, mainly teenage males from ethnically-defined neighbourhoods in the outer boroughs. In the spring of that year, Bruce Davidson read a newspaper article about outbreaks of street fighting in Prospect Park and travelled across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan in search of a gang to photograph.
"I met a group of teenagers called the Jokers," he wrote in the afterword to his seminal book of insider reportage, Brooklyn Gang. "I was 25 and they were about 16. I could easily have been taken for one of them...
...With the Jokers, the boundary between detached observation and immersion in the subject matter became even more blurred. "In time they allowed me to witness their fear, depression and anger," he wrote. "I soon realised that I, too, was feeling their pain. In staying close to them, I uncovered my own feelings of failure, frustration and rage."...
...For several months Davidson followed the Jokers on their endless wanderings around their Brooklyn turf and beyond. He captured them hanging out in Prospect Park, where outdoor dances were held on weekend summer nights, and lounging on the beach at Coney Island. He snapped the young men as they killed time in a neighbourhood diner called Helen's Candy Store. In his photographs, the Jokers look both tough and innocent, uncertain adolescent kids caught in that hinterland between childhood and – this being New York – premature adulthood.
Davidson's black-and-white images are cool and evocative, imbued with a sense of time and place that is palpable. The gang shared a working-class, Italian-Catholic background, but look like they have walked straight off the set of West Side Story. The girls are timelessly hip in tight pants and white tops, with pinned-up piles of jet black or peroxide blonde hair. The male dress style is Italian hipster meets American rockabilly – Sinatra meets Elvis. The threads are sharp, the hairstyles tall and quiffed, and the attitude, as caught by Davidson's camera, is either defiant or aloof to the point of disinterested....
...Brooklyn Gang, then, is a document of inner-city youth culture at a time before the term was even coined. It is also a requiem for a bunch of Italian-American kids who bonded and, for a time, found a kind of community that had been denied them elsewhere – at home, in the church, at school..."
Click on the following link to read the whole story and the real-life tragedies behind the cool facade in the exceptionally well written article by Sean O'Hagan for The Guardian :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jun/21/bruce-davidson-photography-brooklyn-gang
(photos taken via magnumphotos.com© 2012 Magnum Photos - All rights reserved)
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