Magnum Blog / Directing Gangsters

Directing Gangsters

Japan. Asakasa. 1998. Two members of the Yakuza, Japan's mafia. The Yakuza's 23 gangs are Japan's top corporate earners. They model themselves on American gangster fashion from the 1950s. © Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos I took the picture of these two Yakuza in a Ginza coffeeshop. I had a hard time not to find them but to keep an interpreter. I went through at least four, all women, because each time they agreed to do it but then gave it second thoughts and retracted for fear of the Yakuza! What I was thinking and saying: Can you please light up the cigarette again, again, again... Three times! And then I kept saying: "Hold it! Hold it!" Links » Bruce Gilden's Magnum Portfolio » Bruce Gilden's Books (Signed from the Magnum Store) » Bruce Gilden's Magnum In Motion Essay "Coney Island" » Bruce Gilden's Magnum In Motion Essay "The Rat Story" » Bruce Gilden's Magnum In Motion Essay "Fashion Magazine" » Bruce Gilden's Magnum In Motion Essay "Foreclosure"

david bowen

hello bruce.

it´s a great photograph... thanks for posting .. love it.. the glittering watch and cigarettes shooting in different directions..
mainly though i like the one eye open ( one eye half closed on the main mans face.. tough..

it¨s interesting...
there are occasions, such as this, where shooting to snatch moments spontaneously could result in problems,..

i used a clip of you shooting around new york streets to teach from recently, and your style surprised the students in the way it indirectly, (or sometimes more directly), confronted people... do you find it easier to shoot this way in your home town / country than when away?

clips here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkIWW6vwrvM and i guess it+s shooting part of ´rat story´

my question is just out of interest... since i have often found it easier to shoot in a direct way towards people i relate to more.. from a similar cultural background.

best
david

Michal Daniel

Nice! Very nice!

Here is a Czech member of The Family:

http://www.proofsheet.com/czech/source/10.htm

mike

Bruce,

When I look at your work, I think Weegee and I think theatricality and I think about the lizard brain.

You must consider yourself somehow a son of Mr. Felig, the famous... I see you both picturing a story of unconditional love to the people who inhabit New York (and beyond...) with all the drama and absurdity and unconventional beauty that implies.

I see the theatricality of film noir, of course... monochrome, dramatic raking artificial light... gangsters, gamblers, losers, molls living in a lurid, sometimes ominous, sometimes ambiguously eroticized, always strange world where anything can happen at any moment.

I also see something deeply compulsive about the photographs... that they originate from, or resonate on a subconscious level… pre-verbal or pre-rational... the feel to me like artifacts of an ancient part of ourselves, the lizard brain, looking.

So I wonder, am I off my rocker or on to something? What do you think about Weegee? Are you a fan of film noir? Do you think there is such thing as pre-rational photography?

How about making a movie? Bruce Gilden remakes Naked City. Wouldn't that be something!

Rich Riordan

Hello Bruce

Good to see you here, I love your work. I've just been going over your stuff on the website and your aggressive style is so unlike my own.

You mention in Magnum in Motion that some guy on the beach wanted to fight you because he thought he was in a picture you were taking of two women. And in another clip you say that a bitter lady hated you when you took her picture.

I'm wondering if you often get into fights/altercations with your style of being right in someone's face?

Did it ever bother you to shoot this way or don't you care how people think of you? Were you always this aggressive in your approach or did you have to work up to it?

I'm not criticizing your approach - in fact I really like it. But every time I see your work (or while watching the video footage of you shooting in NY from youtube) I feel like a coward and that I could not possibly approach people in this way.

To cite one more example, your shot of a large breasted woman using a reflector to tan herself on the beach. In the clip you say she is telling risque stories and that she knew you were there. I'm thinking, My God!, how could she NOT know you were there?!! You're on your knees, with a 24mm lens, honing in on her ponderous breasts. Hardly discreet stuff. I'm surprised you came away with all of your teeth. How do you get the nerve? Did fighting and slapping and screaming ensue?

Any thoughts/advice for one still learning the game?

Rich Riordan

Logan Lamech

That's pretty cool. So they don't try and deny it like the classic, "there is no mafia", approach of the American gangster?

Logan Lamech
www.eloquentbooks.com/LingeringPoets.html

Patricia Lay-Dorsey

Bruce, I can't help but wonder if the reason you had trouble keeping interpreters in Japan had less to do with their fear of the Yakuza and more to do with their discomfort over your confrontational approach to your subjects. Each of us brings our unique ways of relating to others to our work, and our photos reflect this. Your work is generally hard-edged, in-your-face and filled with a sense of immediacy. NYC raw. Not necessarily attuned to the Japanese culture's traditional respect for others. But it works with the tough segment of Japanese society you chose to focus on. Too bad you couldn't have found members of the Yakuza to interpret for you.

mike

Patricia, I'm surprised you would pick this particular story and photograph to raise your issues with Gilden's work...

I think you'd have a very difficult time convincing me, for one, that this photograph was made in a "confrontational" way. Isn't this the polar opposite? Isn't it the product of an inclusive, respectful, collaborative interaction? He had an interpreter, and must have asked to photograph the gangsters, who must have agreed, who then offered what they chose to offer to the process, and chose to accept his direction. How is this confrontational?

Rather than confronting his subjects, I'd argue Gilden confronts his audience in a more direct and subversive way. These are very ambiguous photographs, there is no promise of redemptive moral catharsis, no familiar melodrama I mentioned earlier, the comfortable signs of humanistic photography are missing or subverted. I'd argue you are meant to be uneasy, disoriented; this is what makes the work as extraordinary as it is.

Hinting at a lack of respect for others, or entering the minds of the interpreters is simple speculation and reads to me like projecting this unease onto the photographer and his process... unless I’m misreading, and you were actually joking.

Erica

I find this to be an extraordinary image..and I also find it comforting that you had to work to get it.

Patricia Lay-Dorsey

Mike, I meant no disrespect towards Bruce or anyone here. Sorry if my comment gave that impression. Online communication can be so easily misconstrued. And I agree with Erica. This is a super portrait!

Patricia

mike

Patrica, No, no... no disrespect taken, and none, hopefully, received by you. I was honestly a confused by your reading of the photograph and the story... and was trying to make sense of it.

Also, I'm not defending anybody or any thing, a great deal of that goes on in blogs I know... except maybe the validity of examining how photographs, as the things they are, operate in culture, and how they operate on us...

chiahsing

Hello Bruce,
I really admire your courage to approach people so much and shoot quickly with a flash, for myself I have never shot this way out of respect for the object. I always remember Bresson's words:

"Avoid making a commotion,just as you wouldn’t stir up the water before fishing.
Don’t use a flash out of respect for the natural lighting, even when there isn’t any. If these
rules aren’t followed, the photographer becomes unbearably obstructive."

Well I think that in documentary photography we should try best to keep the realty in the works,but your way does much engagement into the object, maybe you have somehow changed the real fact of it, it's such a difficult problem for me...

Best wishes!

Nike Kobe IV

You are a great Photographers!