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Boston: Combat Zone 1969 - 1978

February 12 - March 16, 2010

opening reception: Friday, February 12th 6 - 8pm

Howard Yezerski Gallery is pleased to present Boston: Combat Zone 1969-1978, an exhibition featuring black and white photographs by Roswell Angier, Jerry Berndt and John Goodman on view from February 12 through March 16, 2010.

Deriving its name, Combat Zone, from the brawling sailors and soldiers that frequented the number of movie theaters, bars, restaurants and lounges during the 1950's and 1960's. It was largely an unrestricted public sphere teeming with all kinds of activity and human behavior legal and otherwise. By the 1970's, an unprecedented social and cultural transformation had taken place. Many theaters began to screen adult movies and strip clubs such as "Teddy Bare Lounge", the "Naked Eye", and the "Two O'clock Club" along with the burlesque house, "The Pilgrim Theatre", grew in popularity. These establishments have since been demolished, their demise attributed to a number of socio-political and economic factors that have changed the urban landscape of Boston.

The works of Angier, Berndt and Goodman depict the Combat Zone during the pinnacle of its transformation, and provides a view into the complex world of adult entertainment, still today a lightning rod for cultural conflict in American society. Jerry Berndt and John Goodman photographed the provocative and at times, arresting energy of the streets as well as the personas that inhabited them. Roswell Angier provides an intimate perspective of the nightclubs and their performers. These three photographers created a unique portrait of a time and place as they captured the energy of the street, the clubs, and the general mayhem of the night that was the Combat Zone.

Roswell Angier graduated from Harvard University and the University of California, Berkley. Angier has published several books including, A Kind of Life: Conversations in the Combat Zone, and recently Train Your Gaze: A Practical and Theoretical Instruction to Portrait Photography. His work is the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Fogg Museum at Harvard University. He teaches at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University Boston.

Jerry Berndt was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1943. As a photojournalist, he has worked in Haiti, El Salvador, Guatemala, Rwanda and Armenia and his work has been published in The New York Times, Newsweek and Paris Match. Berndt was an instructor at the Art Institute in Boston and at the University of Massachusetts. He received an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and grants from the University of California. Berndt’s photographs are represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Boston Public Library and the Bibliothèque National in Paris. He lives in Paris.

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a BA in History, John Goodman studied with Minor White in Cambridge from 1972-1974. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, RollingStone, and the London Times. John's photographs are in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Boston Public Library, The Fogg Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and SF/MoMA. He is on the faculty at the Art Institute of Boston and teaches at the Maine Media Workshops. Joyce Carol Oates reviewing Goodman's monograph The Times Square Gym states that "John Goodman's camera, is not an instrument of detachment, analysis, or judgment, but an iris of an eye that is our own, dissolving ostensible barriers between object and subject." He is presently working on his next book.

For further information please contact Howard Yezerski Gallery 617.262.0550 Tuesday - Saturday 10-5:30pm