Brooklyn Gang

Here is more greaser inspiration for you.

Brooklyn Gang was published by one of my personal favorite photographers Bruce Davidson (I wrote about another book of his, Subway in a previous post, but I can’t locate the link :D ) and his capturing of a Brooklyn street gang at the end of the 1950s. Here is an excerpt from the Guardian:

In 1959, there were about 1,000 gang members in New York City, mainly teenage males from ethnically-defined neighbourhoods in the outer boroughs. In the spring of that year, Bruce Davidson read a newspaper article about outbreaks of street fighting in Prospect Park and travelled across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan in search of a gang to photograph.

“I met a group of teenagers called the Jokers,” he wrote in the afterword to his seminal book of insider reportage, Brooklyn Gang. “I was 25 and they were about 16. I could easily have been taken for one of them.”

There is actually a lot of wonderful information surrounding the book in this article, read on here ..