The New York Times, May 8, 1981
By Vivien Raynor

Other shows this week include: ''Gargoyles and Cherubs'' (Henry Street Settlement, 265 Henry Street): This show is not, as its title implies, a survey of architectural details, but an extensive tour of the Lower East Side taken by two young photographers, Ed Fausty and Brian Rose. The neighborhood extends from 14th Street down to the Brooklyn Bridge and as far west as the Bowery and Third Avenue. There are those who call it the East Village and see it as Old World charming (it certainly does have its Calcuttalike aspects). But it is a place where much has been suffered and where mean tenements designed for turn-of-the-century immigrants greatly outnumber the brownstones - symbols of past affluence and now the focus of the dubious process called gentrification.

Possibly because they themselves live there, Messrs. Fausty and Rose present an accurate report on the neighborhood that is affectionate without being sentimental. They have eschewed cliche shots of colorful ethnics, old people with picturesquely seamed faces and visual poems about the romance of decay, choosing instead to take the beauty and the dirt as it comes. Delancey Street looks its feisty but not especially warmhearted self on a sunny day, and there is a magnificent view of the Williamsburg Bridge walkway soaring off into the sky, as well as several beautiful shots of the dusty little storefronts that abound in the neighborhood. One of these has a display of skullcaps wrapped in plastic as if they were cheeses, while another, evidently converted into a club, features a statue of the Virgin Mary accompanied by athletic trophies. Graffiti grow like tangled creepers over a bathhouse in one park. In another, pigeons weigh down the branches of a tree - and occupy the benches. And there's an extraordinary nighttime view of a building at the junction of Henry and Grand Streets that is flanked by street lights drooping like ornaments in an Art Noveau bookplate.

Financed by fellowships from the Creative Artists Program Service, the photographers, who work mostly in color, have done a first-rate job. Don't miss their study of a community garden behind a chain-link fence on 12th Street, where purple crocuses sprout from boxes of soil and an inspirational mural on a wall behind shows cabbages all the way to the horizon.