This serves as a reference in photography. Please read, and write your reaction about the article. What lesson did you learn from It? Is the situation applicable here? In related cases? Specify.
Photography takes the professional to the war front. It leads him to the eye of the storm as it brews, to the floodwater as it rises and falls, to the heart of a society in trouble.
Photography is a friend and foe to different people. It offers fame, in fact heroism for which many photographers paid with their lives, in documenting people, events and places that shape our lives and history.
Photography is one of the most significant inventions of modern man. And it has broadened the various fields of discipline from art to politics, interconnecting them, and enhancing their common goal to "wire" the world through multi--media.
I am thankful to Life-Time for this article. As a regular subscriber of the Time Magazine, and recipient of Time-Life photographs and articles through my e-mail, I find it an opportunity to share selected articles such as this, for my students in photography, viewers of my Blog and audience on Paaralang Bayan sa Himpapawid (People's School-on-Air).
Gang of New York: The Reapers, 1972
Courtesy of Life-Time
Time1 of
Photographer-John Shearer—Time
& Life Pictures/Getty Images
Reapers president Eddie Cuevas meets with
gang members, South Bronx, 1972.I
0s
Forty years ago this
week, LIFE magazine published an intimate and, for the time, remarkably
even-handed article on the mounting problems associated with street gangs in
New York and other cities around the country. The piece focused on one gang in
particular — the Reapers in the South Bronx — and featured a series
of powerful color pictures by a young photographer named John Shearer.
Shearer, only the second
African-American staff photographer ever hired by LIFE — after Shearer’s
mentor and friend, the great Gordon Parks — was uniquely qualified, among
the magazine’s not terribly diverse stable of shooters, to capture the Reapers’
days and nights. But even he had trouble penetrating the gang’s wall of
suspicion.
“I visited the
neighborhood five or six times, without my camera,” Shearer recently told
LIFE.com, “just so I could get a feel for that part of the South Bronx. A few
times I was approached by Reapers asking me what I was dong there, but largely
I was left alone.”
Then, on one fortuitous
early morning after a late night in the neighborhood, an exhausted Shearer was
sitting outside a bodega drinking a cup of coffee when a Reaper literally
almost tripped over his legs. It turned out the young man was none other than
Eddie Cuevas, the charismatic president of the gang.
Shearer and Cuevas got
to talking, and when Cuevas learned that Shearer was not only a genuine
photojournalist with an impressive list of assignments already under his belt,
but that he was also the son of Ted Shearer, the groundbreaking visual artist
and creator of the long-running comic strip Quincy, it was a
done deal. The next day, Cuevas informed Shearer that he could begin shooting
the Reapers lives in earnest.
“Eddie fancied himself
something of an artist,” Shearer recalls. “He’d designed the Reapers’ colors,
for example, and the fact that my dad was the man behind a comic strip that he
read every day provided me with my ticket into his world, in a way.”
For its part, months
later LIFE wrote of that world in its August 25, 1972, issue:
Eddie Cuevas, 20 years old, is
the tough president (“Prez) of a tough 200-member Bronx street gang called the
Reapers. He has been a Reaper since he was barely into his teens. The Reapers
were then declining, losing strength steadily to the more glamorous incoming
drug culture. But the street gangs have come back in New York and other major
cities. They are larger and more dangerous than before, but now drugs are out.
“I saw what they did — lots of guys ripped off, string out or dead,” says
Eddie.
In the Bronx alone there are
over 100 street gangs … Gangs still argue perpetually, fight often and even
occasionally kill over such matters as prestige and “colors,” the sleeveless
denim jackets bearing the gang’s name and symbol … “Gangs like the Reapers are
good and bad,” says a Bronx patrolman on he beat. “One night they’ll spend two
hours helping us look for a rapist, the next they’re out to beat up some
civilians.”
The article ended with a
mention that Eddie had been arrested on a charge of attempted homicide. He was
in Riker’s Island jail, awaiting trial. He eventually beat the charges, and
even found some work for a time painting sets and doing other part-time work
for theater companies after Shearer made a few inquiries in an effort to Cuevas
escape the gang life.
How long Eddie’s
“straight” life lasted, though, remains a mystery. Shearer lost touch with him,
and with all the other Reapers, not long after the feature ran in LIFE — a
not-unusual occurrence that, Shearer admits, was emblematic of one of the toughest
parts of the job.
“You’d work for weeks on
an assignment,” he told LIFE.com, “and sometimes — not always, but
sometimes — the relationships and even the friendships you forged during
that time could be pretty intense. But maintaining those relationships was
close to impossible. It simply wasn’t like today, with email and Facebook and
all the other ways people have of keeping in touch with each other, instantaneously,
all over the world. You’d be off on another assignment, and then another, and
then another, maybe all the way across the country, and there’s just no way
that we could have stayed in touch with everyone we came in contact with and
stayed on top of what they were doing, or even if they were dead or alive.”
In recent years, some of
the Reapers from those days have gotten in touch with Shearer, finding him via
the Internet and seeing if he might be interested in meeting again after all
this time. In fact, not long ago he was invited to a reunion, of sorts, in the
Bronx — but it turned out that the weather that day was hellish and it was
impossible for him to travel down to see his old (some of them now very old) acquaintances from where he now makes
his home in a small town north of New York.
“I really would have
liked to have been there,” he says, “but it just didn’t happen that day. Maybe
some other time.” The way Shearer says it, that phrase — maybe some other time — sounds different than the
way it does when most people use it. It sounds like he means
it. It sounds like he wants it to be true.
_______________________________________________________________________
John Shearer has been a photographer, writer, director, lecturer
and professor. At 17 years old, he was one of the youngest staff photographers
at a major publication when he was hired by LOOK magazine, where he covered
civil rights and the race riots of the 1960s. He was hired by LIFE in 1968,
where he was the second African-American staff photographer in the magazine’s
history. Shearer has won 175 national photography awards. His work has been
exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA and the Whitney Museum.
Related
Topics: 1972, color photography, Crime, John Shearer, Life Magazine, New York City, The Bronx
Read more: http://life.time.com/history/gang-of-new-york-the-reapers-1972/#ixzz25erahOig
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