Coney Island and all the temptations that dwell there mean many things to many people. To Doug Healy, the Cyclone roller coaster is a metaphor for life. “It has ups and screaming downs, and bumps on the turns,” Hardy says.
Hardy, of Westport, is one of 15 photographers whose work is on display at Westport Arts Center’s “Coney Island: Side Show,” one of three satellite exhibits complementing Wadsworth Atheneum’s “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008.”
The Westport show features eight internationally known photographic artists, alongside four from Westport.
One of Healy’s photographs is a strongly horizontal panorama of the Cyclone, a favorite subject of photographers for decades. It depicts the coaster itself, from a distance, admiring its majesty. A 1950 Arthur Liepzig silver gelatin print gets closer, focusing on two joyful women holding the safety bar in a coaster car. Harold Roth’s 1970 Cyclone shot is a sharply diagonal capture of a car on a downward slope, its riders flinging their hands in the air.
The Steeplechase Parachute Jump epitomizes the heyday, and diminished present-day, of Coney Island. A 1940 image by Roth shows riders shooting downward in their ‘chutes, whizzing past logos for the candy Lifesavers that dot the tower. Liepzig caught people — two sailors, a man in an ill-fitting suit — on the ground looking skyward at falling bodies. Nathaniel Gibbons, the Westport town fire inspector, went to Coney Island last year to show the now-inoperable ride in the background of dilapidated buildings and community gardens. Healy’s straight-on photo of the jump has a skeletal feel.
However, curator Helen Klisser During said the title “Side Show” refers more to the day trippers who flock to Coney Island. “There is so much to look at Coney Island beside the actual shows and and attractions,” she said. “There are the little vignettes, the little clips of humanity that are timeless.”
Morris Engel’s shots of people on the beach emphasize the mass of bodies that was a common sight on summer weekends. Sid Grossman prefers to zero in on couples enjoying the sand, the sunshine and each other. Leon Levinstein’s photos are contemplative and lonely, capturing single vacationers or groups of beachgoers, disillusioned or unimpressed. One exception is Levinstein’s “Coney Island at Night,” from 1958, a charming snap of a car filled with gleeful African-American children. Bruce Davidson shows a darker side of Coney Island, focusing on gang members.
Marvin Newman’s funny color images show Coney Island in 1953, but in the winter, when shops and restaurants were boarded up. Middle-aged and elderly residents, wearing heavy coats and scarves against the cold, see the storefronts not as a vacation mecca but as an everyday social hub, where they can sit and chat the day away and sometimes sunbathe, using reflective tanning shields over their winter coats.
David Kalman of Westport has a bay of his own for his fun series of images of scantily clad women participating in the 2010 Mermaid parade.
The spectacular center of the exhibit is a long exposure by Stephen Wilkes of Westport, a wide-frame overhead image of Coney Island gradually morphing from blinding sunshine on the right to midnight darkness on the left.
Other photographers are Thomas Frederick Arndt, Joel Meyerowitz, Weegee and Sy Kattelson.
“CONEY ISLAND: SIDE SHOW” will be at Westport Arts Center, 61 Riverside Ave. in Westport, until March 14. Gallery hours are Monday to Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. www.westportartscenter.org.
