T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S B O O K R E V I E W 2 3 An “anticivic epidemic” is what the political scientist Robert Putnam called it in his 2000 study of American isolation, “Bowling Alone.” But we weren’t always so apart, so screen-bound. The last gasp of mutual belonging in this country might have been immortalized in the photographer Neal Slavin’s 1976 book WHEN TWO OR MORE ARE GATHERED TOGETHER (Damiani, $45) , now reissued with later images. His societies, unions, teams, clubs, congregations, troupes and battalions, shot in quest of what Slavin called “the American icon,” are staged in charmingly homemade compositions of the kind you’d discover in a photo album. Members of the Lloyd Rod and Gun Club in upstate New York smile with their shotguns and red flannel, like a class photo. Park rangers line a rim of the Grand Can- yon, framed from so far away you can’t see their faces. Aging lawn bowlers in Florida are a joyful blur of white linen. One senses a benevolent tribalism in these pages, even in the juxtapositions: The high cheekbones and studious ease of a hundred models from a chic Manhat- tan agency, for instance, appear shortly before the frank dignity of 15 members of the National Association to Aid Fat Americans. Bodily awareness equal in both groups. Slavin’s trick: In every shoot, he let the members arrange themselves, he tells us in the preface. Accidental individuality is the result. With their brilliant gender framing and a cracked fourth wall, the managers and dancers of Philadelphia’s burlesque Troc Theater form a “Las Meninas” for the age of Scorsese sleaze. From 1980, his 20 women artists are the screaming opposite of the 18 suit-wearing, smoldering painters from Life maga- zine, 1951. Slavin’s artists — including Laurie Anderson and Faith Ringgold — explode in colored shirts and conversation, faces turning every which way. Slavin documents not factions but natural selections. His photographs feel inevitable, delightful, affirming and — in the years since Putnam’s prophetic book — tragic. 0 U p Close / American League / B y Walker Mimms Photos by Neal Slavin capture clubs, co-workers and cohorts across the country in the 1970s. WALKER MIMMS’S writing on art and culture appears in The Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and other places. The Grand Canyon National Park Service, 1972-75. The National Association to Aid Fat Americans in Westbury, N.Y., 1972-75. The St. Petersburg Lawn Bowling Club in St. Petersburg, Fla., 1972-75. The Lloyd Rod and Gun Club in Highland, N.Y., 1972-75. PHOTOGRAPHS BY NEAL SLAVIN 0