Coney Island with A Tele-Rolleiflex

A flattened, sandy oval pressed like a wad of gum into Brooklyn’s ample instep, Coney Island has been a draw for photographers for as long as the medium has existed. Although its marshes and dunes gave way to urban sprawl by the late 19th century, the island retains a ribbon of beach that during the stifling summer months is a godsend to untold thousands of city-dwellers and the photographers who document their presence. Every summer day New Yorkers come here in droves, disgorged from nearby subways, seeking boardwalk, beach and ocean, a minor league baseball game or the charms of an amusement park. 

They travel long distances—two hours by subway from the Bronx!—for the same reasons their parents and grandparents did, or would have if they could: to claim their inheritence beside the Atlantic in the city’s most egalitarian public space. They come despite a lingering seediness, despite rats, overcrowding and biohazards. These include rip-currents, melinoma and such colorful urban bric-à-brac as spent condoms or used syringes bobbing on the tides. (Sightings of these last two, perennial in decades past, are thankfully less common these days). 

While I’ve not bathed in the waters off Coney Island since my twenties—July ’91 to be precise, a month endured like each of my early summers here without the benefit of air-conditioning—I have returned many times since to soak in the atmosphere. More than any other place I know, its boardwalk and beaches retain a sense of an earlier New York, flamboyant and unapologetic, at ease with its outer-borough accent and ready to strut. The island is in its way a rebuke to Times Square, a numbing mega-plex whose corporate makeover at the close of the last century dazzles out-of-town visitors but leaves many New Yorkers cold.

In recent years my visits to Coney Island have unfolded in the company of my Tele-Rolleiflex, a camera tailor-made for the setting. Its telephoto lens, shot from a waist-level position, allows me to get close to the action without crowding my subjects. More than any other camera in my collection, its double-barreled snout also marks me as a character— “Mister Photographer,” as one Puerto Rican woman of a certain age (not so very far from my own) said as she called out to me on a recent visit. She is the beaming lady, second from the right, in the photo below.

In any other place, that salutation, uttered aloud, might come with a dose of sarcasm, but here it was conveyed with an affectionate wink. In hindsight, this neoyorquina’s message reflects a deeper credo that these days seems almost quaint: wherever you’re from, however weird or eccentric, you belong here. On Coney Island, at least, that idea—hopelessly schmaltzy; American in the least xenophobic, the best sense—continues to flourish.

The “film roll” of frames below is composed from photos taken on two visits to Coney Island one year apart. In summer 2024 I made exposures mid-morning, when the light was still soft and the beach was filled with young children and their grandparents, many of them immigrants from Eastern Europe, Russia and Latin America. The later outing, this past August, occured in the heat of the day, with abundant exposed flesh and the beach and boardwalk under relentless direct sunlight having the quality of a great broiling bazaar (epitomized in the featured image at the top). The commodity peddled?

Summer—in all of its sweat and vitality.

Film Roll

Historical Note

The fifth image in this series shows the Parachute Jump, which soars 260 feet (80 meters) above the sand. A highlight of the 1939 World’s Fair, this structure—yes, it was an actual parachute jump—was relocated from Flushing Meadows to an amusement park in Coney Island in 1942. A landmark sometimes called “Brooklyn’s Eiffel Tower” (whether earnestly or ironically depends on the speaker), it ceased operations in 1960.

Technical Note

I shot these images on Kodak Tri-X 400 with a 1960 Tele-Rolleiflex whose native lens is the 135mm f4 Zeiss Sonnar. For frames dated 2024 I used PMK Pyrocat Developer; those dated 2025 were processed in Kodak HC-110. I scanned the negatives with a Fujifilm XT-50 digital camera with a 200 mm f2.8 Fujinon macro lens. Aside from cropping adjustments no digital alterations were made. I’ve printed most of the series in the darkroom on Ilford FB paper. Unsurprisingly, this makes the photos look great.

COVER IMAGE:  Great Broiling Bazaar, 2025

Share this post: