Description

Coney Island, the world famous pleasure beach, has been the summer destination for New Yorkers since its heyday in the 1890s. Bruce Gilden first began photographing it in the late 1960s and has continued right up to the 2000s. During that time, its reputation has steadily slipped, and Gilden has captured this transition in all its faded glory.

 

I became a photographer because I’m basically a shy person, and on the street I didn’t have to talk to anybody

Bruce Gilden
© Bruce Gilden | Magnum Photos

An iconic street photographer with a unique style, Bruce Gilden was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946. Although he did attend some evening classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Bruce Gilden is to be considered substantially a self-taught photographer. Right from childhood, he has always been fascinated by the life on the streets and the complicated and fascinating motion it involves, and this was the spark that inspired his first long-term personal projects, photographing in Coney Island and then during the Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

Over the years he has produced long and detailed photographic projects in New York, Haiti, France, Ireland, India, Russia, Japan and now in America. Bruce Gilden joined Magnum Photos in 1998. He lives in Beacon, New York.

© Bruce Gilden | Magnum Photos

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