Coney Island 1943 - 1944

This gelatin silver print called Coney Island was snapped by Nathan Lerner. It is a tight crop. A real study in seeing. I am wondering if Nathan was thinking about visual barriers when he was looking through the lens. There is a hand on a railing, and the weave of a big basket – perhaps a trash receptacle – is set against a distant scene of a beach crammed with humanity. He has really jammed the picture plane. I can imagine him walking along the boardwalk on a summer’s day and being drawn to the play of textures. How the basket weave both obscures and reveals the scene behind. It's almost as if he is thinking about the push and pull of figure and ground, like those gestalt psychology experiments. He’s got a great eye for the abstract qualities of everyday life, a real knack for finding beauty in the mundane. It reminds me that photography is a continual exchange of ideas over time and between artists. It really is a beautiful form of embodied expression which embraces ambiguity.