"No photographer in their right mind had ever meticulously brought back home a sample of stinky Coney Island trash," write Sophie and Bruce Gilden in their slim wax paper catalogue (written in French and English) for Baptiste Lignel and Johnny Miller's evocative Coney Island. Coney Island, which won a prize at this spring's New York Photo Festival, is like the real Coney Island - vivacious, brazen and decidedly unsanitized (and maybe even unsanitary!).

As the catalogue points out, it's not easy to find a new perspective on an old and often photographed subject like Coney Island: Weegee, Leon Levinstein and Lisette Model are only a few of the many who have captured its frenetic crowds and honky-tonk beauty. Lignel and Miller bring a fresh approach to this old but ever evolving place with playful and provocative contrasts of shape, color, texture and text.



Miller collected many pieces of Coney Island trash - Popsicle sticks, playing cards, lottery tickets - and photographed each against a stark white background. Lignel's portraits of Coney Island visitors show people in the midst of beach activity: lighting a cigarette, tying a bikini string, clutching a stuffed animal prize. Side by side, as if visual doppelgangers, Miller and Lignel alternate their found Coney Island objects with found Coney Island human subjects. Some of the juxtapositions are clever, some comical, some suggestive, others provocative or even questionable. A speared candy apple recalls a woman's ample breasts; an empty baby oil bottle seems a snarky commentary upon a decidedly unglamorous woman wearing a t-shirt reading "Major Babe;" splayed strands of seaweed echo a couple's elegantly intertwined hands. But there is also sadness in the interplay of shapes and moods: in one photograph, half-finished cheese fries from Famous Nathan's show a wasteful desperation that is reinterpreted in the anguished face of a crying child squirming in her grandmother's arms.




In a 2009 interview, Miller, who, along with photographer Federico Farias is partner with Lignel in their photography cooperative, Otra-Vista, discussed an upcoming project that will focus on "memory-playing...mixing things that are both meaningful and not meaningful." Coney Island is visual synecdoche: its juxtapositions of text and object recall Magritte's Key of Dreams, challenging the viewer to confront association and meaning with a similarly rousing and original jolt. Best of all, their contribution to the oeuvre of Coney Island photography is infused with the brash wit, feisty aplomb and even the markedly unquiet desperation of the place itself. —Joscelyn Jurich