“A LOST WORLD OF STICKBALL AND BOARDWALKS”: BROOKLYN GANG, ONE OF ONLY 150 COPIES SIGNED BY BRUCE DAVIDSON, WITH A PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINT FROM THE BOOK ALSO SIGNED BY HIM

DAVIDSON, Bruce. Brooklyn Gang. (Santa Fe): Twin Palms, 1998. Square quarto, original black cloth, original photographic dust jacket, original black cloth clamshell box. WITH: Gelatin silver print, measuring 5-1/2 by 8 inches, matted; total piece measures 11 by 10 inches. $6000.

Signed limited first edition, number 9 of only 150 copies signed by Davidson, and one of only 50 to include a matted gelatin silver print of young men outside a tattoo parlor from the book, also signed by Davidson, in pencil on the verso, featuring 71 sheet-fed photogravure plates.

In book form for the first time, this is the "most memorable" of Bruce Davidson's early photo essays, "the grainy, cinematic record of the time he spent hanging out with a Brooklyn teen gang called the Jokers" during the late 1950s (Roth, 196). Brooklyn Gang reflects Davidson's award-winning reputation as a "poet of transition, drawn to places and moments on the verge of historical eclipse… The images of that summer have an eternal quality to them… a lost world of stickball and boardwalks, of Vaseline hair and rolled sleeves" (New York Times). Published here in book form for the first time, photographs from Davidson's series initially appeared in Esquire (June 1960). Text by Davidson; Emily Haas' interview with gang member Bengie. With publisher's printed limitation slip laid in.

A fine signed book and print.