Leader of the Pack – The New York Times

‘They treated me like an invisible man,” Bruce Davidson told me. “I was a shadow.”

He was sitting in the living room of a large, tony Upper West Side apartment building with a courtyard — the fruit of a long and very distinguished career in American photography — and was talking about something that happened more than a half century ago. In 1959, he spent 11 months shooting a stunning portfolio of the members of a Brooklyn gang called the Jokers, producing one of the first full-immersion photo essays about an American youth subculture.