NYAB Event - Stephen Shames “Bronx Boys”

Stephen Shames “Bronx Boys”

Steven Kasher Gallery

This event has ended.

Bronx Boys by Stephen Shames presents a collection of 123 powerful duotone photographs made from 1977 – 2000, chronicling the lives of a group of boys coming of age in what was at the time one of the toughest and poorest neighborhoods in the United States. On assignment for Look magazine, award-winning photographer Stephen Shames went to the Bronx where he began photographing the Bronx boys living on streets ravaged by poverty, drugs, violence and gangs. They bonded together and raised themselves in “crews,” adolescent families they created for protection and companionship. Shames’s empathy for the boys earned their trust and respect, and over the next two decades, as the crack cocaine epidemic devastated the neighborhood, they allowed him extraordinary access into their lives on the street and in their homes. Shames captures the brutality of the times—the fights, shootings, arrests and drug deals—that eventually left many of the young men dead or in jail. But he also records the joy and humanity of the Bronx boys, as they mature, fall in love and have children of their own. Challenging our perceptions of a neighborhood that at the time these photographs were made was too easily dismissed by some as irredeemable,Bronx Boys shows us that hope and redemption are possible everywhere.