Purple Martin Press

The Purple Martin Press is pleased to announce the publication of Peter Kayafas: Coney Island Waterdance, a collection of 30 photographs of people swimming in the ocean at Coney Island.

The photographs, made during many summers, and one particular winter (when Kayafas was a member of the Polar Bear Club), are filled with energy, movement, grace, and a surprising intimacy. For more than a century Coney Island has been a subject of fascination for artists. Kayafas’s focus on the swimmers over a period of two decades, provides an extended insight into the elemental relationship people have with water.

Excerpt from Peter Kayafas’s afterword:

The activity of being in the water, whether it is breathtakingly cold or welcome relief from summer heat, is both a distraction (good cover for a photographer) and a disinhibition, the combination of which makes for remarkably immediate, energized, and even intimate portraits. I kept my camera hidden underwater while I roamed through the crowds of people splashing, wrestling, or embracing; then, at the last moment, I pulled the camera up to my eye to make the photograph. These images are, for me, like passages from some primal, beautiful ballet — the energy, gesture, and emotion of the narrative rising and falling with the subjects on the waves.