[Front row: Bruce Davidson,
Brooklyn Gang, 1959 media is often just a distinction between them. We could make the cut at any time in its history, banding proposals favor an idea, or simply start with those who favored, if not an aesthetic dodge at least the move towards other possibilities documentaries. The first project
photo of Bruce Davidson,
Brooklyn Gang [1959], it could be one of those possibilities
. In this case, a renewed way of interfering in the urban and small environments and impassable in the neighborhood by bringing a culture of marginal youth sector in the late 50's. Davidson contacted with The Jokers, a youth group that did not correspond with the models rise american dream, making a description of their social patterns, ideals, limited by the environment, their meeting places or gestures in a collective statement difficult. Ten years later, in 1968, Davidson conducted another project of incalculable value,
East 100th Street. For two years, will portray the residents of the tenements of East Harlem, and will do from the perspective of a new humanism photo, bringing out the dignity of its people and giving them a role that details the individual who faces the consequences of poverty, but above all to his own life to a bleak urban environment. Both
photo essays by direct influence on other American photographers of later generations. That influence demarcate a precise style. First, given the commitment to the issues and involvement with the environment itself, a fact that came from the radical life and photographs of Eugene Smith to address their proposals and extend for years to reach what he considered the link between that commitment and art. Second, putting in the foreground a new narrative of the modern city, giving visibility to those peripheral areas generated by urban policies, unemployment, drugs and crime. Davidson will not be the first to be set in such contexts. To cite one example, the influence of Walter Rosenblum
in the construction of Bruce Davidson's own view is clear. The latter provides a narrative use of the image that gives the whole a hitherto unprecedented depth in the 60's.
[Front row: Walter Rosenblum, 1938 contemporary 
Eugene Richards, second heir to Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange from their 1973 paper 
Few comforts or surprises: the Arkansas Delta . In 1978 Dorchester Days
published a photo essay which shows, from a diverse perspective and not subject to a specific subject, the degraded environment of a small American city, that of the photographer. This book is reeditaría in 2000 with new pictures [I bought it in Dublin, in the library of the Gallery of Photography in Temple Bar, as well as other books by Richards and others], but since its first edition was in sight the ability Eugene Richards to reach the tracks, some of them complicated and difficult to access. otherwise not in 1994 published a book indispensable and equally surprising,
Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue
, whose core narrative focuses on the effects of the drug in three different communities and neighborhoods. A radical book, both in visuals and editorial and journalistic in their approach, incorporating very seriously in-depth interviews and testimony in person. Approaches the subject from different angles and the consequences produced by the drug in such strongholds Marginal street and domestic violence, youth gangs, drug traffickers, police racism, communities struggle to eradicate the drug, the experience of the drug by children, loving relationships to physical and mental degradation that occurs. This is a test of great depth that it would take four years of work.
[Eugene Richards, Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue , 1994] Read
A year earlier, in 1993, a little-known photographer wins prestigious
W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography
, with a story that continues this tradition by introducing the subject of autobiography. Marc Asnin
becomes a reference required in the broad range of social photography Uncle Charlie: A Photographic Album Family about Mental Illness, but their contribution is focused again on familiar urban spaces, limited neighborhood.
Uncle Charlie is a stunning visual record of the attempts to portray through his family's fight against poverty and disease. In photographic terms, the question that arises is precisely the emotional closeness to the topic, because the photographer is part of the narrative to stand as the subject-witness involved in the consequences of what he says. In the words of Asnin:
Eighteen years ago, I Began shooting a 20 year documentary about my Uncle Charlie and the rest of my Brooklyn family. No Holds Barred This epic photographic Concerns a unique family, my own. It's a story of how two Generations Problems and move down the line. We see how my uncle deals with historical burden of Mental Illness, and how I Pass That burden to His Children.
[Marc Asnin,
Uncle Charlie: A Photographic Album Family about Mental Illness, 1993] Marc Asnin
continue that work from different fronts, making a career in the publishing world and in point of social reporting. In this same predicament publishes highlighting not only visually, but also for its difficulty, reaching the value thorough consideration: The Corner
, Skinheads, etc.. That will be a constant in this line of photo-documentary essay. Be seen in its full extent in the work of Davidson and Richards, but in Asnin, especially Uncle Charly
, seems to be a twist: the story tells of a particular social problem, but through their own experience . That portion of subjectivism stresses applied to the family environment without detracting from the description.
The autobiography, to the extent that the photographer is no stranger to the social space that has been proposed to portray, is also present in the work of Brenda Ann Kenneally . As Asnin, also won the
W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography , in 2000, a project framed in the neighborhood of origin, Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where she still lives. His book Money, Power, Respect: pictures of my neighborhood
picks that work, focused on the problems of drugs and the devastation caused by the crack members of different generations. His book reveals a marked influence of Eugene Richards and said Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue . In both books is ethical-expressive use of wide angle lenses when the plane has to stick both indoors to outdoors as more or less loose, which strengthens the position of the photographer extremely close to the characters and context. This way of working has its aesthetic consequences, but also moral: the photographer does not elude the commitment, rather it intensifies in an attempt to understand the action, emotion and consequences: Ninety-nine Percent of the photographs in my OCCUR project on our own street. Here Are Most Conflicts about power. Money is a way to get power, Drugs are a way to get money. Respect is power. The root of my project WAS teen mothers, But Now I'm Following Families from mother to daughter to granddaughter.
[Brenda Ann Kenneally,
Money Power, Respect
, 2000]
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