Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

We have just joined The Commons on Flickr to share a selection of images with the Flickr community and to begin our partnership, it seemed appropriate that we start at the beginning! William Henry Goodyear was the Museum’s first Curator of Fine Arts. As an architectural historian (he is known for his book entitled The Grammar of the Lotus), he documented his travels. Goodyear collected lantern slides to illustrate his slide lectures which he presented here at the Museum and during his travels around the world. What you see in The Commons today are selections of images documenting Egypt as it appeared around Goodyear’s time as well as what he saw when he visited the Paris Exposition in 1900.

Left: Lantern Slide Collection: Views, Objects: Egypt. Abu Simbel [selected images]. View 05: Egypt. Abu Simbel., n.d., This slide colored by Joseph Hawkes Brooklyn Museum Archives (S10|08 Abu Simbel, image 9491).

Right: Paris Exposition: Champ de Mars and Palace of Metallurgy, Paris, France, 1900. Exposition of 1900. General view of the Chateau de Mars taken from the Chateau d’Eau. [The Champs de Mars towards the Metallurgie Palace]. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Goodyear Archival Collection (S03_06_01_015 image 1945).

While the Brooklyn Museum staff is the primary user of our Libraries and Archives, we are open to the public and are always looking to reach out to a wide and varied audience. One of the challenges is ensuring everyone knows which resources we have available and listening to the needs of our visitors, so we know what to provide and how best to present these materials. One of the more interesting results of “growing” an encyclopedic collection is that we have research collections that serve as an intellectual link to the objects and perhaps act as storytellers revealing the cultural context of the objects. Think about the possible stories behind these photographs and then tag the images with the story you see. Take a look at these photographs and tell us how you would like to use them. What other materials would you like to see?

We believe that by sharing these images we will support a better understanding of the cultures that have created the great art that is held by this Museum. We hope you will agree.

We join The Commons on Flickr today and do so in a manner we hope will start an interesting discussion. Our Principal Librarian, Deirdre Lawrence, has posted about the collections we’ve uploaded and I’m going to write a little about the techie details.

Flickr is a fantastic community. For the last two years, we’ve been uploading photographs (mostly behind-the-scenes of various installations) on the Museum’s Flickr feed. Our experience on Flickr has been a great one where we’ve had a lot of fun and learned a lot from this community who speak their minds without hesitation. When The Commons came along, we jumped at the chance to be part of it because The Commons allows us the ability to upload works from our Archival collections and we hope by doing so, it will create an additional dialogue.

To begin our partnership with The Commons, two sets of images have been uploaded—a selection of images from the Paris Exposition of 1900 (part of our Goodyear Archival Collection) and a selection of images of Egypt from our collection of lantern slides. The Paris images are uploaded at a standard 1200 pixel wide medium resolution, but for the Egyptian images we wanted to offer something more in the spirit of “The Commons”—the Egyptian set has been uploaded at the highest resolution we could provide based on the original scans. This means you can go to “all sizes” and see these images near 3000 pixels on the longest side. While we can’t offer images at this quality all the time—the small amount of revenue we generate from reproduction offsets the costs of caring for the collection—we did want to see what it teaches us about the needs of the people looking. This is “The Commons” after all, so let’s take this opportunity to talk about the issues. Is high resolution really more useful? Is the sampling of these materials of interest in this arena? How are you using our images? What images of yours relate to our collection images?

So, drop us a line (comment here or at Flickr or email) and let us know what you think. If you have a “now” image to our “then”, use the HTML code Flickr provides to post that image response into the comments area. What’s next into The Commons for us? No clue. We are curious to hear from you about the materials we’ve uploaded and will let that be our guide as we consider what to upload next.

Final note: Deb, Angie, Steeev thanks for making this upload and captioning process easy on me

A recent post on NYC Social alerted us to the Brooklyn Bridge’s upcoming 125th anniversary celebration (May 22nd-26th), featuring fireworks on the 22nd. Fireworks have to be one of my favorite NYC treats, from the 4th of July to the display over the beach at Coney Island on summer Friday nights. Artists–and photographers, especially–love fireworks, too. It’s a real challenge to capture the magic.

Bruce Cratsley (American, 1944–1998). Brooklyn Bridge Centennial Fireworks, 1983.
Gelatin silver print. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Billy Leight, 1996.167. © Bruce Cratsley

There’s a long tradition of fireworks over the Brooklyn Bridge, from its opening in 1883 to the centennial in 1983, and I’d venture to guess that every one of them has been captured by artists. A few years ago, we digitized everything we could find in the Museum collection that had to do with the Brooklyn Bridge, including some wonderful fireworks images. Take a look at The Brooklyn Bridge and the Brooklyn Museum: Spanning Art and History.

There must be thousands (millions?) of photographs around from the last big celebration in 1983, in shoeboxes, slide carousels, and all of other analog places. This time, though, it’s going to be easier to share all of the digital images sure to be created during the 5-day celebration. Join our Brooklyn Bridge (Brooklyn Museum Web site) Group on Flickr and add your amazing fireworks images to the more than 900 images of “our” bridge on Flickr and linked to the Brooklyn Bridge pages on Museum website.

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.

Following up on this earlier post, our new video has just been published to our YouTube feed. Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this project!

For the past several months, we’ve been working with filmmaker Matt Wolf on an upcoming video project. The video is in the final stages of editing, but I wanted to take a moment to write about the process. When we first met with Matt, he had the idea to do a rapid-fire combine of visitor portraits and objects in the collection. Because his vision was so closely tied to our mission (which considers the visitor experience paramount), we thought it might be an interesting twist if the collection photography used in piece was actually taken by our visitors.

We had been running a Brooklyn Museum Flickr group and had always been thrilled by the diversity and the quality of the shots that had been submitted to the group over the years. For the video, we selected 10 photographers who had been part of our Flickr community to participate by photographing areas of the permanent collection. Similar to our earlier Visitor Video Competition, one of the most interesting elements became how each photographer captured objects in a distinctly different way. As shots started to come in for review, I kept finding myself really looking at objects again and noticing how different the photography differed from our own. Objects that I see every day, took on new life and we hope these different takes will help show off the museum in a new way in the final video. (more…)

It’s great to see all the amazing contributions to the Flickr group for Goodbye Coney Island?. This is proof that Coney Island still attracts photographers from all over, as it did since its early beginnings. Amateur photographers went out to capture bathing and leisure of the late 19th century, commercial photographers of the early 20th century spread the images of this entertainment capital to magazines and newspapers all over the world, and amateurs and art photographers alike, from the mid-20th century and on, have found in Coney’s chaos and craziness and endless source for portraits and creative compositions. Your postings show that Coney Island is still alive and a powerful inspiration for good, creative photography.

Wonder Wheel, van swearingen

untitled, luluinnyc

For this blog I selected a few really striking images from the Flickr group, some of them showing, even today, that the classic rides from the 1920s are among the most popular subjects to shoot. There were earlier Ferris wheels at Coney, but it is the colorful Wonder Wheel, with its double ring of cars, that has infused visitors’ imagination since 1920. Look particularly at van swearingen’s incredible image of the wheel, with a dramatic and complex composition, and also at the more low-key drama of luluinnyc’s interpretation of the wheel and the surrounding rides.

cyclone, chutney bannister

Today, the only remainder of the three classic roller coasters is the Cyclone from 1927, a New York City Historic Landmark since 1991. The Tornado, from 1926, burned in 1977, and the Thunderbolt, from 1925, was closed in 1983 and demolished in 2000. One photographer in the group, egulvision, captured this sad moment.

Thunderbolt Demo. Nov. 17, 2000, egulvision

The Thunderbolt was the first of the three signature wooden roller coasters of the 1920s. It was built on the Bowery in 1925 on top of the late nineteenth-century Kensington Hotel, and was featured in Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall, where the character Alvy Singer lived under the roller coaster in the former hotel, occupied until the end.

f-coney island 17, penmadison

The 1920s was a prosperous period for Coney Island. In 1920 the subway was extended all the way out, making the trip even faster and cheaper than before. Up to one million visitors a day would come to enjoy the beaches and the amusement parks with higher and faster rides. The subway, like many of the rides and the famous hot dogs at Nathan’s (beautifully captured in pennmadison’s shot), cost five cents, a fact that contributed to the description of Coney as the Nickel Empire.

Coney Island Sunset, Architectural Orphans

The Coney Island beach was made public in 1915 after a long legal battle, and the boardwalk was finally constructed in 1923. Municipal baths replaced the many private establishments, and the city added sand to fight erosion and create more beachfront. At this point the exclusive Seagate had long since separated from the main part of Coney, while the eastern end had gone out of fashion, with the last remaining luxury resorts quickly disappearing. The Oriental Hotel closed in 1916, and Brighton Beach Hotel was razed a few years later. Many Eastern European Jews and Italian and Greek immigrants also took up residence in the neighborhood in this period. By now, Dreamland was long gone, and Luna Park was somewhat declining, but Steeplechase, the first of the three classic amusement parks, was still a popular destination.

Coney Island Parachute Jump, minimal design

Another important landmark, visible in many of the images on Flickr, is the Parachute Jump. Today covered in a coat of red paint, the Parachute Jump is the only remaining sign of Steeplechase Park (which closed in 1964). The steel tower originated as a ride at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and the Tilyou family bought it for Steeplechase in 1941. In the years during and after World War II, riders were hoisted to the top of the tower in a canvas seat attached to a closed parachute. When dropped from the top, only the parachute would slow the descent. Like the Wonder Wheel, the Cyclone, and Childs’ Restaurant, the tower is protected and will remain at Coney Island even after the redevelopment of the area.

Time to rain, balitc 86

I am very excited that Patrick Amsellem, curator of photography, is working with us on a web project in conjunction with the Goodbye Coney Island? exhibition he curated in the Luce Visible Storage-Study Center. We have created a Goodbye Coney Island? Flickr group which photographers can join and submit their best photo of Coney Island. From this pool Patrick will select four photos to feature in his posts on our blog throughout the run of the show.

This idea came about because the other day I joined Patrick for a discussion of Goodbye Coney Island? and he spoke about the popularity of Coney Island throughout the years as a subject for both American and International photographers. I am a casual photographer, and his comment reminded me how much I enjoy going to Coney Island to take pictures with my Polaroid, Holga and digital cameras. Every time I am there I see countless other photographers strolling the boardwalk in search of the perfect shot to capture the Coney Island’s essence. What a better way to pay homage to this fabled part of New York, I thought, than to engage some of the photographers in our community in conjunction with this exhibition of more than fifty photographs from the Brooklyn Museum’s holdings that traces its evolution over the past 125 years. We look forward to seeing the photographs everyone will choose to post!

To participate please join the Goodbye Coney Island? group on Flickr: (more…)