13-‐year-‐old Rafael jumps from one building to the next, eight stories up. 1977
Man blows smoke rings next to elementary school age kid in pool hall. 1980
Early in the morning, a 10-‐year-‐old boy sleeps on the fire escape, where he slept all night. 1989 or 1991
Boy gives photographer the finger. 1982
Teenage boy with M-16. 1985
Boys in the hallway outside a party. 1992 – 99
Teenage boys jump into a public swimming pool at night. They climbed over the fence. 1984
Young man with toy gun. His son is at left. Two teens kiss. 1985
Vi är oerhört tacksamma över att ha fått publicera de här bilderna ur Bronx Boys (University of Texas Press), som vi räknar in bland de allra främsta fotoböckerna 2014. Det är en oerhört drabbande bok, med foton som är omöjliga att värja sig emot.
Vi vill tacka Lena Moses-Schmitt på University of Texas Press, vi vill tacka Steven Shames och vi vill tacka hans pr-agent Andrea Smith, som generöst lät oss publicera fyra foton utöver dem som fanns i pressmaterialet. Tusen tack!
Alla foton © Steven Shames
Och som om inte det vore nog så har vi fått tillstånd att publicera Steven Shames korta och kärnfulla förord. Han är en samhällsengagerad och mycket spännande fotograf och förordet är en perfekt introduktion till Bronx Boys:
”The Bronx has a terrible beauty, stark and harsh, like the desert. At first glance you imagine nothing can survive. Then you notice life going on all around. People adapt, survive, and even prosper in this urban moonscape of quick pleasures and false hopes.
In the 1700s Thomas Hobbes described life in a state of nature as ‘continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ Life is still that way in the Bronx.
I took my first photos in the Bronx, at the request of John Durniak, for Look magazine in 1977. Look died while I was on assignment. I continued for two decades, sometimes staying on the block for weeks at a time, sometimes visiting only once or twice a year.
These are pictures of friends, people whom I met as children and who became my family, as well as people who stepped in front of my camera once and afterward disappeared forever. I watched my friends grow up, fall in love, have children of their own. The boys in the original ‘crews’ are now in their forties—their children are becoming adults. A few, including my two godsons, have made it. Many others are dead or in jail.
Often I am terrified of the Bronx. Other times it feels like home. My images reflect the feral vitality and hope of these young men. The interplay between good and evil, violence and love, chaos and family, is the theme, but this is not documentation. There is no story line. There is only a feeling.”
– Steven Shames
Utöver det rika fotomaterialet och Shames förord, så innehåller Bronx Boys också två andra mycket läsvärda texter, ett kort efterord av José ”Poncho” Muñoz och en längre självbiografisk essä av Martin Dones. Osminkat berättar han om sin barn- och ungdom, ofta mycket tuffa villkor, och om hur Shames sakta men säkert blev en naturlig del i hans och kompisarnas vardag.
Du kan köpa boken direkt från University of Texas Press, pris $33.50, där hittar du dessutom mer material om den. Och glöm inte att hiphoppen föddes i Bronx.
Ola Wihlke
BearBooks 