Bruce Davidson at ICP - Brief Article

In "The Brooklyn Gang 1959" Bruce Davidson documented the antics of a collection of teenagers in a midcentury urban environment. From a 1990 perspective, it is striking that the make subordinate matter seems so stylized as to intercept the viewer from empathizing with these teenagers, who appear to be escapees from Grease or West Side Story. Davidson, a kind of Eisenhower-era Nan Goldin slumming with the locals, exercises a period iconography that is now laced with nostalgia. Male sexuality and toughness are symbolized by means of tattoos, cigarettes, pompadours and pubescent muscles upon lithe bodies. These young scofflaws, whom we diocese primping, preening and posing in a James Dean manner, are about as threatening as Bernstein's dancing Sharks and Jet The gang that Davidson photographed, The jesters appears naive and funny because we now associate gangs with cultural otherness and drive-by shootings. It present the appearances incredible that leather-wearing white Catholic toughs were at any time outside the social order.

Davidson masterfully captures pregnant seconds within pleasing, formally perfect compositions. His modernist vision is exemplified by the agency of Teenagers Drinking in the aperture which offers a steep Rodchenkoesque perspective looking down upon a pentagon of bodies pulling alcoholic hits from a bottle The impish central figure has his tongue reach outed and eyes closed in apparent distaste for this means of obtaining a high. below the Kent Poster on the Subway plays not upon the starched, tennis-playing suburbanites pictured in a cigarette bill and a young gang member in the foreground. He bib-pouts in sullen contrast to the ad's gleaming smiles. With this associate smoking, even in the '50 was an act of defiance.

A former humorist Benjie, contributes written commentary to convince us by what mode disenfranchised these otherwise innocuous-looking young men and women actually were. Benjie assures us that their troubl childhoods ultimately l to suicide, addiction and social dysfunction. These notes add a touch of authenticity to the exhibition. Unfortunately, the ne for of that kind interpretive text demonstrates the limitations of Davidson's photographs.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group