A Review of Go by Bruce Gilden - Mike Bennett

Gilden, B, 2000, Go, Trebuk Publishing

Bruce Gilden is an American street photographer, well known for his confrontational approach and fearlessness in the face of danger, an approach no doubt severely tested by the work presented here, given it includes bosozoku (bikers ) yakusa (Japanese mafia ) and various street people, tramps and a whole list of the forgotten.
“Go” is a game, very popular in Asia, where the idea is to acquire territory, suggestive of the Yakusa who feature heavily in the book,  whose aim is broadly similar. The book is laid out in bright blocks of red, a colour strongly associated with the Japanese in both negative and positive ways, though all the photos are single or double page, slightly above A4 size, no borders, no captions, all in black & white, stark, monochrome. The title is on the last page in small type, the only writing a very atypical one page Q & A near the back, the chapter breaks are more culturally standard manga type images, oppressive yet familiar, schoolgirls and samurai, the expected and the known. The introduction is noted as such as its first, but is a scrawled list of slight descriptions of picures taken, annotated, circled, a virtually secret language of Gildens own understanding.
The work seems to be almost photojournalism, a harsh realism, a document of the hidden people of Japans cleancut and perfect image of harmless automatons. Certainly there is no lack of emotion displayed here, amongst the mass of pain, there is confusion, sadness, distress, anger, though mostly pain. It tells us that every society has its fringes, an underground or underclass that is kept from the publics view, a dirty secret.
My conclusion as to the success of “Go” is that Gilden has tried to portray a societies forgotten or ignored people in a very direct and documentarian way, using design and sequencing to elevate the already brilliant photographs, until the book comes across as a sort of bright, and despite its content, beautiful artifact, a elegiac museum piece for the disaffected and the dispossessed.

Gilden, B, 2000, Go, Trebuk Publishing

Gilden, B, 2000, Go, Trebuk Publishing