‘Photos While U Wait, Coney Island’

‘Photos While U Wait, Coney Island’ Marvin E. Newman, 1953

PLEASURE. THAT, HISTORICALLY, has been the promise of the boardwalk where New York City’s B train stops. Not the kind that lasts. That would be too much to ask. But the kind delivered by that first bite of a Nathan’s hot dog. Or the moment before you see the sideshow mermaid is actually a salmon tail stitched to a dead monkey. Or the interlude after the photographer has snapped you in fancy dress with someone you hardly know, and you’re waiting for things to develop.

This is what Coney Island means to visitors, who come to escape the gasoline fumes and hot concrete of Manhattan. It’s a zone of instant gratification. For those who have known it during the winter months and through its long periods of neglect, however, it’s a place where you wait for something to happen. For the day-trippers to return and spend some money. For property developers to make good on their assurances.

Marvin E. Newman, then a young photographer with a master’s degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology, got up early in the morning to secure this shot. The light was bright, the air was cold, and this island resident, swaddled in black, perched on the planks for him like a watchful raven.

Newman’s work often supplies its own captions. He once photographed a silver Bentley cruising Manhattan’s 42nd Street past a cinema marquee advertising an Italian cannibal horror flick called Let Them Die Slowly. One of his greatest images observes the red neon of a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! show turning the wet sidewalk into a murder scene. That shot forms the cover of his new monograph, which, somewhat scandalously, is also his first. Marvin E. Newman is 89 years old. But some pleasures are worth waiting for.

FOR VISITORS, CONEY ISLAND IS A ZONE OF INSTANT GRATIFICATION.

Pigment print, edition of 75, each with collector’s edition book, 18 x 12 inches, $1,500; TASCHEN.COM