Customer Reviews

Brooklyn Gang: Summer 1959

5 star:		(3)
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3 star:		(1)
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This new edition of Bruce Davidson's classic study of tough New York youths in the 50's, marks a most welcome and sure-to-be-collected photo book. The reproductions and layout are superb, rich and textured, and the accompanying text is illuminating. And this doesn't even begin to describe the superb images Davidson, one of the world's great "street photographers" captures here. In all, without much of Davidson's work in-print, aside from "Central Park," this is one that art photograpahy fans and those interested in New York's colorful past will surely want to own.

Bruce Davidson's classic work captures the raw emotion of a group of Brooklyn teenagers in the long vanished Summer of 1959. The photographs are very natural and unstaged, and capture a powerful sense of adolescent desolation, even amidst a crowd of other teens. The kids hanging out on the street corner, at the candy store, or huddled under the boardwalk at Coney Island convey an intense, desperate sort of energy. These photographs are charged with the sensation of growing up and living in a world before everything became a media spectacle. Some of these kids may have copped a pose or two from James Dean, but the defining appeal of James Dean as an actor was that his emotion felt vividly real. One wonders how such an unmediated, honest, street level take would even be possible today. This book is a treasure of American urban social history and a tour de force of emotional power.

This is some of the most emotional pictures I have seen. Brooklyn Gangs rates as my favorite photo books of all time.

an interesting collection of photos of youths living in brooklyn during the 50's
im not quite sure why this is referred to as a gang--as there is no gang type of life really shown in these images. a better name for this book should have been BROOKLYN FRIENDS