Coney Island 1908

Geldolph Adriaan Kessler captured this silver gelatin photograph of Coney Island, sometime in the early 20th century, a time when amusement parks were becoming cultural landmarks. This photograph presents the park as a constructed fantasy, and its appeal was in the promise of escape from the everyday for the burgeoning urban masses. The image creates meaning through visual codes of leisure, with its artificial waterways, fanciful architecture, and the implied presence of crowds seeking entertainment. In America, during this time, the rise of consumer culture and the availability of leisure time shaped social life. Places like Coney Island became stages where social classes mixed, however briefly. To understand this image better, we can look at social and economic histories of American leisure, urban planning archives, and even the marketing materials used to promote Coney Island. Art like this serves as a reminder that its meanings are contingent on the social and institutional contexts in which they were made and viewed.