By Julie Elman

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY
New York, NY

Coney Island may be “a poor man’s Riviera,” as photographer and teacher Harvey Stein puts it, but it’s produced a wealth of experience for 11 photographers who participated in a workshop with Stein to document the New York amusement park with a storied past and an uncertain future.

As a result of the two-weekend summer workshop in 2007 with Stein, each participant had four images hanging at the Umbrella Arts Gallery in Manhattan’s East Village for two and a half weeks this past June. “That doesn’t happen in most classes,” says Stein, also an author and curator who currently teaches at the International Center of Photography (ICP). “All the gods smiled on us.”

There’s probably no better person than Stein to guide eager shutterbugs through a visual exploration of Coney Island, a Brooklyn peninsula that is currently undergoing some major redevelopment, much of it controversial.

Stein has been documenting the park since 1970 and in 1998 published a book that featured color photographs of Coney Island spanning 30 years, aptly titled Coney Island. He’s currently at work on another book of the area, this time from 1970 to 2010 (to be published in 2011, he hopes).

Stein has taught the workshop “Coney Island: Day & Night” for four consecutive years at ICP, and when some of last year’s workshop participants approached Stein about a show, he took their request seriously. Most of the participants were on the intermediate level and ranged in age from the mid-20s to retired, showing that it’s never too late to go back to school. He met with them individually and asked each student to submit his or her best images, plus ten more, to shape into a potential exhibition.

Before the class set out to photograph at the park, Stein asked them to each find a theme, a story of their choosing, and saw it all come together as he edited their work: the signs, local characters, the beach and the rides. After viewing their pictures six months after the workshop, Stein said he realized that “their work was good, and good enough for a show.”

“I looked for the strongest [pictures] that went well together,” he says. “I looked for lively and varied kinds of images.”

There probably won’t be any future exhibitions coming out of his workshops, Stein says, but show or no show, covering the “last funky place in New York City” will no doubt continue for those drawn to its allure.

“Coney Island is deeply embedded in my soul,” writes Stein in his artist statement posted online at www.harveysteinphoto.com. “I go there to find renewal and inspiration, to meet new people, to witness the astonishing mix of humanity and to make photographs. Is it any wonder that photographers are constantly attracted to Coney Island?”