Night Lights at Coney Island

Before World War I

Luna Park (1906).

I found these photographs at the Library of Congress. I think they belong to another world. I have difficulty describing what I feel as I look at them. Perhaps it's like flying an open glider through a galaxy of stars, while breathing the air of a warm summer night near the seashore.

Where does the power of these photographs come from? Part of it, I think, is the abstract expressionism inherent in black and white photography. The film only writes down what it wants to write down.

Luna Park (circa 1905).

And then there is the willing suspension of disbelief. We want to be taken away to a strange and beautiful place. Call it Dreamland, if you will. That was the name of an amusement park in Coney Island at this time, and one of these photographs was taken there. No wonder Sigmund Freud visited Coney. He had published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899.

The other three photographs belong to a place called Luna Park. French film director Georges Melies released a film called A Trip to the Moon in 1902. Among its antecedents were two novels by Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Around the Moon (1870). Meanwhile, in America, an amusement ride called A Trip to the Moon made its debut in Buffalo, New York, in 1901 and stopped briefly at Coney Island's Steeplechase Park in 1902 before landing in Luna Park, which opened in 1903. (For more on Luna Park, see John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century, 1978, pp. 61-72.)

I suppose it's worth pointing out that all of this took place before the Wright brothers became the first to fly like a bird, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, at the very end of 1903. 

Luna Park (between 1903 and 1906).

Luna and Dreamland were two of the main amusement parks in Coney Island before World War I, and Coney was very popular with the intelligentsia of the time. I recently learned from The New Yorker that Marcel Duchamp visited in 1917. His 1911 painting Nude Descending a Staircase (# 1) helped change the way people look at looking. It's in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

Duchamp's painting stands at an interesting intersection of still photographs and the new movies. In the 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge invented time-lapse photography, producing still images of a horse, and then people, moving through space. These photographs lie behind the idea of splicing all the images together and projecting them on a screen to produce moving pictures. Duchamp then took the motion of the movies and deconstructed it into its component parts, thereby letting the world in on the secret behind the magic of movies. 

Dreamland (perhaps 1905).

Dreams and lunacy; photographs and movies. And men flying like birds. It was a very interesting time. So many new things, and new ways of looking at things, and people were open to all of it. 

I wonder how the world would have developed if The War to End All Wars had not intervened, maiming people and deforming whole societies with the immensity of its trauma. 

See also City of Lights, Layers at the Beach Front.