Log in to track your reading progress.
Overview
During the summer of 1959, Bruce Davidson followed a loosely knit "gang" of teenagers around Brooklyn, New York. His camera captured these children of the James Dean generation in both private and public moments at the soda fountain, the tattoo parlor, Coney Island, and late night basement dance parties. The beautiful adolescents that fill the pages of this book exude a cool sensuality which came by way of the young Brando and Dean, and traveled from American shores around the world. Davidson has created an exquisite photographic elegy for a time when, in retrospect, we all seemed young.Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
In 1959, when now-acclaimed photographer Bruce Davidson was only 25 years old, he began documenting several months in the life of a Brooklyn street gang called the Jokers. Davidson photographed the gang members, he writes in Brooklyn Gang, "as they stood late at night on the street corner, hung out in the candy store, or went to the beach at Coney Island with their girlfriends." Although a few of the photos were published in Esquire magazine, only now have a large number of the photos been collected in book form. These portraits of angry, disaffected youths who turn to one another for a sense of connection and community serve to remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same.Library Journal
In 1959 Davidson read about the teenage gangs of New York City. Connecting with a social worker to make initial contact with a gang called the Jokers, Davidson became a daily observer--and photographer--of this alienated youth culture. The Fifties are often considered passive and pale by our standards of urban reality, but Davidson's photographs prove otherwise. In a recent New York Times article discussing this work, Davidson admitted he feared the erratic and often violent rules and routines of the Jokers. It is tempting to consider what this book might have been like had more of the detail of Brooklyn's 1950s white gang culture, as revealed in that Times article, been used to reinforce this spare volume. But this book gets to the point quickly, on its own terms. Nearly 70 sheet-fed gravure plates--images of tough people, tough lives, tough lovers, all trying to be cool--are followed by just two pages of recollections by the photographer and a lengthier interview with Benjie, a surviving gang member, now a drug counselor. Recommended.--David Bryant, New Canaan P.L., CTBook Details
Published
January 1, 1998
Publisher
Santa Fe, N.M. : Twin Palms Publishers, 1998.
Pages
98
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780944092507