Bruce Davidson at ICP


				Bruce Davidson: The Brooklyn Gang at The International Center of Photography
	Corner of 8th Ave. and 17th St., 1959, black-and white photograph
	To see this exhibition of Bruce Davidson’s concerned photography forty years after the creation of these works, makes one aware of a damage to our collective sensibility. In “The Brooklyn Gang 1959,” Davidson documents the antics of a group of teenagers in the mid-century urban environment. From the perspective of the 1990s it is striking that the subject matter seems to be reduced to a style that prevents the viewer from empathizing with these subjects. These subjects seem to be escapees from Grease, West Side Story, or rockabilly’s Stray Cats. Davidson, an Eisenhower era Nan Goldin slumming with the locals, reveals an iconography now laced with nostalgia. Male sexuality and toughness are symbolized by tattoos, cigarettes, pompadours, and pubescent muscles on feminine lithe bodies. Although they were scofflaws in their day, they seem about as threatening as Bernstein’s dancing Sharks and Jets. This gang, The Jokers, now seems naive and funny in light of the present associations of gangs with cultural otherness and drive-by shootings. With all the hindsight media constructions that have come to inform our historic attitudes about the 1950s, it seems incredible that leather wearing white Catholic toughs were ever outside the social order. In these photographs we witness a performative mode before postmodernism, which consists of imperfect primping, preening, and posing in the manner of James Dean. The media awareness of youth then was not as cultivated as it is today. Females associated with this gang betray through their body language a toughness and vulnerability. Favored rituals seem to be the grooming display connoting sexual availability and the resulting make-out sessions as in the “Going Away Party” series. Davidson is a master of capturing pregnant moments within compositions that are formally perfect and pleasing. His true and selective eye in 1959 is a modernist vision, exemplified by Teenagers Drinking in “The Hole” which offers a Rodchenkoesque perspective looking down from above (at juvenile delinquents rather than revolutionaries). Davidson’s is a vision of American dystopia, he reveals a pentagon of bodies pulling hits of alcohol from a bottle. The impish central figure has his tongue extended in distaste for this means of obtaining a high. Under the Kent Poster on the Subway offers a contrast between the suburban ideal of cigarette holding, tennis playing, starched suburbanites (when smoking was good for you) and the mirrored young man in the foreground. He pouts in sullen opposition to the ad’s gleaming smiles. With this fellow, smoking, even in the ‘50s seems detrimental. Benjie, one of The Jokers appearing in the photographs, offers commentary to convince us just how disenfranchised these otherwise nice looking young men and women were. Benjie assures us that the progeny of this troubled youth was suicide, addictions, and societal dysfunction. This commentary gives a breath of authenticity despite any tendency to retrospectively stylize this past. Unfortunately, the need for such interpretive text demonstrates that universalized humanism in concerned photography is constructed rather than transparent. William V. Ganis Bruce Davidson: The Brooklyn Gang is on view at the International Center of Photography, Uptown Branch from December 5, 1998 - March 7, 1999.

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