CONEY ISLAND INFERNO
STEEPLECHASE & LUNA AMUSEMENT PARKS IN THE 1940s AND 1950s
Don Snyder was raised in Coney Island, New York, which left an imprint on his art and creativity. He acquired a camera at an early age and spent his teenage years photographing families clustered on rock jetties or cavorting on the beach among crowded lawn chairs, sun umbrellas, and sand castles. Growing up under the shadow of the Cyclone rollercoaster and the red billowing cloud of the Parachute Jump had a profound effect on Snyder, as did the multiple freak show facades on which he was paid to paint mermaids and monsters.
CONEY ISLAND
As a teenager, Snyder began working in a narrow, cramped darkroom behind one of Coney Island’s “5 for a dollar” photo stalls, and he learned to rapidly process and print photos while customers waited impatiently in the alley for their prints. From 1948 to the early 60s, he combed the beach and shot more than 24,000 black and white photos with out-of-date World War II military film that he bought from a Coney Island hawker for pennies on the dollar. These photos comprised his first photographic opus, which he christened Coney Island Inferno.
EROS
Ralph Ginzburg’s fabled art magazine, Eros, published Coney Island Inferno images in it's second issue. Photographs from the Inferno series were exhibited at the Municipal Art Society of New York in 1987.
