by David and Peter Turnley
Indiana University Press, 2007. 128 pages, 102 b&w photos, 11x11''.

As teenagers growing up in Ft. Wayne, Indiana in the early '70s, twins Peter and David Turnley embarked on a project to document the working class neighborhood of McClellan Street. The work they produced propelled them both into life-long careers as noted photojournalists. The McClellan Street project is presented in full for the first time in a new book on Indiana University Press.

Having grown up in Indiana in the '70s, McClellan Street brings to mind vivid, visceral memories of growing up in the Midwest. It's undeniably a work of the '70s, in content and execution. The pictures expertly capture life in 1972 and 1973, but the straightforward, simple execution looks dated among today's crowded, dark, tilted frames. Yet this style allows they viewer to breathe a little and helps ground one in a sense of place, reflecting the world in which the pictures were taken.

David Turnley mentions that, while the rest of the world was mired in turmoil, his world in 1973 was one of "tremendous idealism." That vision shows through in the photographs. Against the backdrop of cracked concrete, rusting fences, bare lawns and peeling house paint, the Turnley brothers capture photos of a lively neighborhood. And even in the more hardened faces of the adults photographed, you sometimes catch glimpses of Turnely's "tremendous idealism". But not always.

The photographs in this book show that McClellan Street was unmistakably a working class neighborhood. For every photo of a group of smiling children, there's a picture capturing the realism of a middle age man or woman coming to grips with their life ahead and the world around them. It's a restrained tension, a tension in the faces, body language, in the eyes, a tension that runs like a deadly under current through hard scrabble working class neighborhoods anywhere in the world. For all of David Turnley's idealism, the absolute realism of living in a neighborhood like this seeps through the images like sepia.

These 102 black and white photos evoke a visceral sense of time, neatly pegging everyday life in working class America at a moment when the country was coming down from the high of the late ‘60s. Social movements were still taking to the streets, unrest and upheaval, war and dirty politics filled the news. Yet the Turnley brothers' photos capture what else was happening in America at the time — very ordinary people going about their very ordinary lives. Watering and mowing their lawns. Watching television. Smoking. Drinking coffee. Hanging out. Kids playing in the street. Living…and dying. It's noted in the foreword (by John G. Morris) that McClellan Street is now "an extended parking lot."

Yes, this book is a fine document of a neighborhood, in the rich vein of Bruce Davidson's East 100th Street and Eugene Richards' Dorchester Days. But given the neighborhood's future as a parking lot, the photos here carry more weight than simply the launching pad of two illustrious careers. — Mark Murrmann

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