Perfection

Along with Carson McCullers' 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter', Fugazi's 'In On The Killtaker', Jean-Luc Godard's 'Vivre Sa Vie', Johnny Cash's 'Live at Folsom Prison' and Eduardo Galeano's 'Memory of Fire' I will always consider Bruce Davidson's 'Brooklyn Gang' series to be one of the great and perfect works of art of the 20th Century.

Each image is a slice of perfect American post war cinema embedded in a single, captured motionless moment. Romanticism, the myth of the urban rebel without a cause, the meeting of street life and the beach, the encroaching consumerism and the loneliness of love and friendship. Sitting around jukeboxes, or lounging on couches in the corner of a party or dance, lazing on the beach, making out under the boardwalk. 

Who can imagine the chemistry that must have existed between Davidson and his swirling mass of subjects - the 'gang'. Yet, in each photograph, there exists a sublime arrangement, a balance of disregard and disinterest and quiet performance and composure. 

Settle back and grab some pop corn. Let me show you the best film you've ever seen, the best painting you've ever sat motionless in front of, the most sublime piece of music you've ever heard, the greatest novel you've ever read, with all the world spilling forth from it; love, death, quiet and angry violence, melancholia, loyalty, trust, betrayal, the feel of the sun on your skin and the night air in your lungs. All of this is yours now. Thanks to Bruce Davidson.

 

 

 

 

 

and, finally, an anomaly:

(what is strange about the image above is that the distance in this photo is more reminiscent of contemporary photography where the complicity has been lost between photographer and subject and the image is always reserved; at a distance. Perhaps the usual intimacy of Davidson's images is both a part of his unique artistry and also, in part, because, in the days of film, there was no screen, no digital playback, no instant awareness of one's subjectivity already 'on screen'. So the image above feels like a rarity amongst his images. Now, however, it would be the norm; these days, photographers either force intimacy with party blogs and lifestyle editorials, or maintain the cool distance you get as the distant voyeur unprepared or unable to enter into the subject's life. So, to wind back the decades and imagine Davidson, amongst it, engineering performance and arrangement and composition, is to realise that as an artist he was able to scale some kind of sublime peak of shared intimacy in this documentary series. )