Documentary goes deep in Bruce Davidson’s photographs

Bottom line: Photographer legend Bruce Davidson trains his compassionate, discerning eye on the human race in this appealing show.

Known for his definitive photography of the civil rights movement and his deft penetration of American subcultures and groups, from football players to impoverished Harlem residents, Bruce Davidson is the subject of an intensely satisfying solo show at Jackson Fine Art that demonstrates his immersive approach to documentary photography.

The Jackson work is divided into two bodies of work: “In Color” and “The Brooklyn Gang.”

Color has often been used to convey the spectacle of blue skies, American plenitude and supermarket shelves groaning with colorful packaging. Davidson has called those uses of color “gratuitous” and for “In Color,” is after a very different effect in these excerpts from his “Subway” series. Davidson doesn’t use color to generate excitement and interest, but uses it to enrich and complicate his scenes of modern life. In one of those distinctive images, a blonde strap hanger in a fur coat seems to absorb the pallor of the fluorescent subway lights and institutional paint scheme surrounding her, an ambience that gives her skin a cadaver shade of pale.

In another image, Davidson captures one of those melancholy moments of childhood when a day’s adventure gives way to home, bedtime and dissipating magic. This incredibly tender image features three small children grasping their sawdust-filled Coney Island stuffed animals and cheap beach balls, gazing through a grimy subway window as Coney Island retreats into the distance, savoring one last glance in this poignant collision of winsome childhood and sullied adult world.

Twenty-five-year-old Davidson’s penetration of that world signaled the postwar rise of the teenager as a fascinating — and occasionally feared — demographic. In their crisp white T-shirts, a cigarette clamped between their lips, the kids congregate on the steamy streets of the concrete jungle, in city parks, or neck under boardwalks, lost in a reverie of young love and a beleaguered solidarity.

The images are so striking, the fashion so arrestingly modern, the photos can at times suggest a Vogue fashion spread and the seductive appeal of other portraits of glamorous teenage outsiders from Francis Ford Coppola’s “Rumble Fish” and “The Outsiders” to Nicholas Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause.”

Like photographer Larry Clark after him, Davidson sneaks up on outsider kids indulging in the passions and vices that make adults blush with fear or envy. In the way of teenagers through the ages, these kids preen — vamping in mirrors or fussing with biceps and hair — and throw attitude and cool at anyone who will look in Davidson’s mesmerizing black-and-white images.

But underneath is a layer of sadness: You sense the social alienation that explains their tight bonds, and you can see flickers of intense love and loneliness at the margins. Many of their young lives ended unhappily, in drug addiction and suicide.

No mere documentarian, Davidson approaches his subjects with deep affection, riding sidecar to their adventures and romances, in thrall to their charisma and youthful beauty.