Work #3

My constant declarations of love for Bruce Davidson are getting awkward for everyone. But, here is a recent article in which Davidson provides a handful of 'lessons' and advices on ways to work for aspiring photographers. It's definitely worth a read.

And this brief blog is a convenient excuse to post another of my favourite images by Davidson. (Have I posted it before? If I have, I'm sorry... I told you that this is getting awkward...):

image: Bruce Davidson, East 100th Street

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. )

Romance #2

"If I am looking for a story at all, it is in my relationship to the subject - the story that tells me, rather than that I tell."

Bruce Davidson

I should warn you: one day, when I can do any damned thing that I please; when I've made my film adaptation of Faulkner's 'Wild Palms'; when I've completed a quintet of films set along the equator; and, when I've remade Sixteen Candles as a four hour minimalist masterpiece - all to wild acclaim - I am going to make a film about the period of time Bruce Davidson spent photographing the kids in the Jokers gang in Brooklyn and Coney Island throughout 1959. It will be about art and crime, love and lovers, killing time and taking photographs. It will be great. The best thing I ever do. You are going to love it. 

Romance #1

'Bruce Davidson. Kiss. 1959.'

Bruce Davidson. What a lord. I could lose myself in his photographs for ever.

Happy belated Valentine's Day all you lovers, lusters, romantics, sleazebags, and unconsolable adorers.

Love Letter

Dear Middle Aged Couple Kissing On The Park Bench,

thank you for making out like lusty teenagers, legs entwined and hooked over each other. As I rode past on my way home, I felt like everything was right in the world.

Dear Tash and Amiel,

thanks for getting stupidly drunk with me last night and talking about the joy of those films that feel like they are about to fall apart with urgency; that have a heart visible and beating in them, and which have not had all traces of intuition, dreams and mystery beaten out of them by the forensic rationalising of script doctors. It was great, although my sweat smells like Romanian moonshine.

Dear Carlos Reygadas,

thank you for your austerity and rigour, for your ability to create violence from stillness, and for your explosions of visceral humanism, sexual transgression and hybrid bodies at rest and motion. I love you, man, and I think about your films all the time. Thanks also for these sane words:

 "We are all naked when we go to the shower. At least twice or three times a day we are naked. And most of us have sex, once a week or more. It's a thing that occurs often. But it's not represented ever on film. So the normal thing to do would be to ask every other director why they don't have sex in their film and not ask me about it. I am the only normal one."

Dear Justin Timberlake,

thanks for 'Señorita'. It is the greatest single song to select in a closed booth Karaoke session.

Dear Roberto Bolaño,

thanks for writing "Prosa del otoño en Verona". It is sublime, like just about every damned thing you write. I scribbled a dozen pages of swirling, poorly formed prose, inspired like a lovelorn high school poet, after the thrill of reading those few sparse pages.

Dear Cat Power,

thank you for covering 'Silver Stallion'.

Dear Salvador Dali,

thanks for painting this beautiful and strange self portrait and for all those mysterious, labyrinthine sketches that you created years before you painted all that other bloated shit that people go crazy for.

Dear Patricia Clarkson,

you really are great.

Dear Eldest Brother,

thanks for taking it upon yourself to fix my bike on the weekend. To grease the chain, tighten the brake lines, fix the seat and do all the man-shaped things that I refused to do while sitting in front of a random Spanish-themed bar staring at my hands and wondering when a finished film would magically appear in them.

Dear Friends, 

who came across me while sitting in front of a random Spanish-themed bar staring at my hands and wondering when a finished film would magically appear in them. Thanks for coming along when you did, sitting with me, having a drink and talking about weird sexual proclivities. It was getting embarrassing.

Dear Bruce Davidson, Mary Ellen Mark, Abbas, Laura El-Tanawy, Maya Goded, Patrick Zachmann, Jacob Aue Sobol, Joseph Szabo, Jim Goldberg, Jason Nocito, Rachael Cassells, Stuart Franklin et al.

thank you for taking the photographs that I look at most days. They are an epic film of lost love, madness, dawn light, tenderness and burnt fingers that spirals through my mind from one week to the next.

Dear Magaly Solier,

thanks for haunting the recesses of my mind with your strange, piercing eyes and otherworldly presence.

Dear Internet,

thanks for giving me Drunk History, Rick Ross music videos, pictures of giraffes in akward poses, explorations of weird sexual proclivities, PDFs of anarchist treatises and endless videos of cats falling off ledges and people landing on their face. It makes the days and nights float past like a dream. It also allows small moments of transcendental confluence like that which came to pass this morning when I looked at the blog - http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com - and then hours later read of the passing of Kim Jong-Il.

Dear  David Alan Harvey,

thanks for taking this photograph. It hides a special kind of bliss that never ceases to ruin me.

And finally, Dear Carlos Reygadas, 

I forgot to also thank you for reminding us that:

"Everything is touched with absolute grace and disgrace."