Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

One major recent acquisition is Hank Willis Thomas’ series “Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America.” The whole series consists of 82 images, two for each year from 1968 to 2008, and the acquisition includes half of the series: one image from each year the series covers. The work appropriates print advertisement from 1968 to the present that targeted a black audience or featured black subjects. From the original ads, Hank Willis Thomas digitally removed all textual components as well as logos. The remaining figures and scenarios are often both captivating and perplexing, as the artist seeks to disclose the visual strategies of advertisers and how these are based in cultural stereotypes. The images encourages the viewer to think about how marketing images construct and underpin stereotypes about African American life in a way that is often embraced by the consumer of both the image and the product. We are hoping to show this new work at the Museum sometime next year.

Hank Willis Thomas from Brooklyn Museum on Vimeo.

The Museum recently acquired some great new photography. Much of it will be on view this coming August when we open a new show with material from the Contemporary Collection.

In this delicate group of black and white photographs, Dash Snow captures his family and extended family of friends in an intimate and unguarded fashion. In a diaristic snapshot of Chinatown at night, a young woman (Snow’s wife Jade) sits in a doorway with the stroller on the sidewalk close by. Despondent, head in hand, or just tired after a long night out (Dash forgetting the house keys, or so the story goes), the mundane snap shot is full of emotion. Another image shows the couple’s baby daughter in bed sound asleep, humorously juxtaposed with the child-unfriendly traces of a parent’s night out. The poetic rendering of Jade’s naked back bears trace of an intimate encounter and a street portrait of a friend hints at the androgynity of adolescence. A refashioned old portrait of the artist’s grandmother adds glamour to the group while an intense self-portrait shows the bearded artist in profile, the whites of his wildly gazing eyes glowing against his mud covered face. Best known for his often candid Polaroid snapshots, Dash Snow has received much attention over the past few years. An elusive graffiti tagger turned visual artist and Whitney Biennial participant, Snow is part of a tightly knit group of downtown artists who turn life into art in the manner of artists such as Nan Goldin, Larry Clark or Wolfgang Tillmans.

Sarah Baley’s show “Bois” opened at Collette Blanchard Gallery on the Lower East Side last Thursday night and we are very happy to have this image by Sarah in the collection.

Sarah Baley (American, born 1969).  Dug, 2005. From the series: Bois, 2009. Chromogenic print, 24 x 20 in. (61 x 50.8 cm).  Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Artist, 2009.14.

Youth culture and sexuality have often influenced both fashion photography and contemporary art. The work of Sarah Baley, an emerging Brooklyn-based artist, is indebted to the confluence of interests and close dialogue between these worlds in the recent decade. Her series “Bois” is an exploration of a Brooklyn-based, lesbian community who identify as bois. Many in the group call themselves gender queer, which implies a rejection of the gender binary system and an embrace of sexuality as a sliding scale of possibilities. In Baley’s view, sexuality has become one of the few ways in which people can still express freedom. In this image, “Dug,” Baley placed her subject—staged her, dramatically lit—by the East River close to the Brooklyn Bridge. The evolving industrial urban landscape, reflected in the rapid development of Brooklyn’s waterfront, functions as a metaphor or mirror for the group’s fluid definition of sexuality and gender. This photograph will be included in an installation of contemporary art at the Museum this coming August and Sarah’s show is on view at Collette Blanchard Gallery through June 17, 2009.

Lynn Hyman Butler, American, born 1953. The Girl with a Gun. From the series “Coney Island Kaleidoscope” ca. 1988. Cibachrome color print. sheet: 11 x 13 3/4 in. image: 9 x 13 1/4 in. Gift of Ilford Photo Corporation. 1991.59.6

Lynn Hyman Butler, American, born 1953. The Red Horse. From the series “Coney Island Kaleidoscope” ca. 1989. Cibachrome color print. sheet: 11 x 13 3/4 in. image: 9 x 13 1/4 in. Gift of Ilford Photo Corporation. 1991.59.3

In 1983, the not-for-profit corporation Coney Island USA was created to assist in rejuvenating Coney Island’s amusement life. It developed many of the programs that later generations of visitors recognize, such as the Mermaid Parade, Sideshows by the Seashore, and concerts on the boardwalk. Lynn Butler’s dynamic take on the site in her Coney Island Kaleidoscope series is a document of a gritty and still spectacular Coney Island from this period.

Sunset Over Coney Island, April 2006, Flatbush Gardener (from the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr)

In 2006 the owners sold Astroland to a developer who had already assembled a large amount of land in Coney Island’s old amusement area. A short-term lease will allow them to reopen next summer, but it remains unclear whether the developer’s plan for towering hotels, shops, restaurants, movie theaters, and high-tech entertainment will be accepted or rebuffed by city authorities, who proposed their own scheme last fall.

Mermaid Parade Hula Hoopers, drfardook (from the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr)

In the past few years, attempts to revitalize Coney Island have increased; KeySpan Park and the new Stillwell Avenue subway station are the most obvious examples. While many agree that rejuvenation is necessary, voices have been raised against the prospect of turning Coney Island into a gentrified enclave for the well-off.

break dance!, ranjit (from the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr)

New York City’s creation of a Coney Island Development Corporation in 2003 brought together city officials as well as local business and community leaders. This initiative indicated awareness of the importance of caring for the area’s traditional qualities and of keeping it available to a diverse audience while providing a wide-ranging plan for economic development that would include a year-round amusement district as well as many new residential opportunities. At this moment, it is uncertain what the result of these efforts will be.

As many of the postings on Flickr illustrate, images of Coney Island frequently capture a gritty and often sadly neglected landscape. But this kind of urban exploration, especially of an area like Coney, which has always attracted a broad range of people and activities, has often been a stimulating and fruitful source of inspiration for photographers. The wide range of amusement and decay is brilliantly put on display in schveckle’s and Cormac Phelan’s postings on Flickr. These powerful images show Coney Island pretty much as it looks today, neglected but still colorful.

Shoot The Live Human, Cormac Phelan (from the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr)

The straight-forward composition of Cormac Phelan’s gap between two buildings focuses on the sad remains of a popular game. Of course there is an element of humor, but there is also a disturbing atmosphere of gloom and even sorrow, both in the site’s state of decay and in the references to the game itself: Shoot the Freak. Live Human Targets.

hose play, schveckle (from the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr)

schveckle’s creatively and composed snapshot is most probably taken right next to the gap in the previous picture, but here gloom is replaced by summer joy. The wonderful colors, the laughing biker crossing the boardwalk, the girl having a shower, and the onlookers leaning against the railing; nobody seems to be shooting the freak.

Steeplechase Pier, Coney Island, 1938. Sidney Kerner, American, born 1920. Gelatin silver print. Gift of the artist. 1995.128.1

The depression years in the 1930s were difficult everywhere and this was the first time Coney Island really suffered a downturn, as a reduced disposable income made people less prone to spend money on entertainment. Enjoying the free beach and boardwalk promenades, the crowds still arrived in great numbers, but income from amusement concessions plunged even though many barkers and operators cut prices in half. Luna Park, one of the three original amusement parks, went into bankruptcy in 1933, and when it reopened after a brief closing, the park could only afford to light a fraction of its many bulbs. Many people, even families, used the space beneath the boardwalk as temporary shelter. In an effort to use the camera as a tool to reflect a difficult social climate, Sidney Kerner, a Brooklyn-born photographer, had joined Paul Strand’s and Berenice Abbott’s newly established Photo League in 1937, a year before he took his remarkable picture of a depression era kid on Coney Island.

Coney Island, Depression Girl with Safety Pin, 1938. Sidney Kerner, American, born 1920. Gelatin silver print. Gift of the artist. 1995.128.6

Air View of Coney Island Beach and Boardwalk, Brooklyn, 1946. Ben Ross. Gelatin silver print. Gift of the artist. 1998.34

In the prosperity that followed World War II in America, families found themselves with more money to spend, and Coney experienced a brief moment of renewal, with record crowds in the summer seasons of the late 1940s. But the rise of Coney Island in the postwar years was temporary, and from the 1950s, Coney was in steady decline. Postwar suburbanization, car culture, and the creation of parkways and public state parks such as Jones Beach offered people alternatives for day trips in the summer. Robert Moses, New York City’s powerful Parks Commissioner, objected to the kind of entertainment Coney offered with its penny arcades, shooting galleries, rides, and sideshows.

Out to sea, Marc Arsenault - Wow Cool (from the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr)

In 1938 his Parks Department took control of the beach at Coney Island, with efforts to reduce the level of amusements. In the 1950s and 1960s large areas were used for new housing projects built on Moses’s initiative. Widespread gang violence in the 1950s frightened some visitors, and when Steeplechase closed for good in 1964 – a victim of rising crime, neighborhood decline, and competing entertainment – the area dedicated to amusement was dramatically reduced. At this time, a new amusement park, Astroland, had already been established for a few years between Surf Avenue and the boardwalk west of West Tenth Street. This park carried on the Coney tradition during the following decades.

Left: Coney Island, 1969. Stephen Salmieri. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Edward Klein. 82.201.4

Right: Burger Man, urbanshoregirl (from the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr)

In the postwar period Coney Island remained an almost obligatory subject for most photographers visiting or living in New York. New and more affordable lightweight cameras allowed photographers to be freer in the exploration of their topic. Brooklyn-born Stephen Salmieri had just graduated from School of Visual Arts when he started his Coney Island series in 1966. Working in the tradition of many mid-20th-century independent photographers (such as Robert Frank and Lisette Model) who found Coney Island an inspiring subject, Salmieri spent the following six years in documenting a decaying area, still full of life. Coney Island as a democratic destination for everyone subsisted, as testified in Salmieri’s images as well as in many of the pictures on Flickr.

Left: Coney Island, 1969. Stephen Salmieri. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Edward Klein. 82.201.39

Right: ballon water, Supercapacity (from the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr)

It’s wonderful to be able to juxtapose Salmieri’s photos with these contemporary images, showing that there is still a stretch of concession stands on the Bowery, not much different from the ones in Salmieri’s suite of images from forty years ago. Even though some barkers are now relying on electronic amplification to lure passersby to their games, the original intention remains the same. Look especially at supercapacity’s absolutely stunning rendering of a shooting gallery, an image where the spectacular composition and the play with focus communicate both humor and gravity.