It wasn’t exactly a sucker punch, but Jules Allen was struck by what he found upon entering into Gleason’s Gym: sweat-soaked champs and punch-drunk pugs. Gangsters and posers. Men with hats, stogies and secrets. The leonine and the louche. Wiry trainers possessed of supreme cool and confidence.
New York Times, Blog – Lens, October 14, 2011
The Sweet Science of Body and Soul
By DAVID GONZALEZ
Mr. Allen — no stranger to the latter two traits — had gone there to train. He stayed to make pictures. Now, more than 30 years later, he has published those images in “Double Up,” a book that details the bruised beauty he encountered at Gleason’s.
“This was the book I had come to New York to do,” said Mr. Allen, 64, who relocated from San Francisco in 1978. “I didn’t know at the time it would be a boxing book. But I had come here to do something of substance. I wanted to do something culturally specific that would allow me to be culturally general.”
Those principles have guided much of Mr. Allen’s work over the years, which encompasses a number of photographic series on hats, marching bands and nudes, amassing a document of contemporary African-American life. The work is also a pointed response to the kind of photography that he grew up seeing, which presented African-Americans as quiet victims, “folks sitting on the porch” he calls the genre.
“My whole theme as a photographer was I was interested in photographing African-American culture more than anything else,” said Mr. Allen, who has long taught at Queensborough Community College. “I wanted to show a culture of activity. I was tired of seeing photographs of black people sitting on the porch doing nothing. Being victimized. Being dependent. We do things.”
His subjects at Gleason’s were hardly passive. They held their ground.
“Black men are on equal ground in the gym,” he said. “There, you really were what you did. Whatever racism existed, it did not seem to have much effect on the fighters in the room. It was a question of character. It was a place where people seemed to be more equal.”
The idea that he would step into Gleason’s to train in 1983 was not out of character for him. After he graduated from art school in California, he went on to earn a master’s degree in psychology, specifically, he said, to improve his understanding of human nature and photography.
“Before I had no way to approach a disciplined, organized body of work, I was just taking pictures,” he said. “Psychology gave me a context in which I could actually look at the work. How I dealt with what I was looking at. How to talk to people. How to listen to people.”
Jules Allen Website: http://www.julesallenphotography.com/
For the full New York Times article: http://nyti.ms/s60DDu
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