The NYC Mermaid Parade
The Coney Island Mermaid Parade returned this year after two years of being a casualty of the pandemic. It was a virtual parade in 2020. In spite of best efforts, it had to be cancelled in 2021. Our workshop participants gathered on Saturday to journey together to see the parade. What a wonderful experience it was to be there to celebrate its 40th year.
The inclusion of the people on the far right did not strengthen the composition. I have a hard time knowing what to include in and what not to include in the layers. I should have stepped to the right.
The Mermaid Parade is the largest art parade in the United States. It is traditionally scheduled on the closest Saturday before the Summer Solstice on June 21st. It is held rain or shine, hot or cold. The parade celebrates Coney Island and gives New York artists a place to show their work. There is no ethnic, religious or commercial agenda.
If everyone agrees who the hero is in the picture, then that is a success. Generally, the woman in front was thought to be the hero, but it was not unanimous. Who do you think is the hero?
I have to admit, I was simultaneously excited and apprehensive to attend this event. I had it in my mind that it might be like a Macy’s parade at Thanksgiving, which I have to tell you, would be pretty untenable for me. Getting there on the subway was a little like, and you will have to forgive my idiom here, the “dog and pony show” of my last trip to Coney Island. My erratic journey, which took place in April, was a little more of an art form. I was actually transferring back and forth between stations before I got my bearings. Our group was transferring between sides of the track, which involved a lot of stairs going up and going down, back and forth. My error was user error. The error on Parade Day was because of changes in the subway schedule. We finally settled into a nice Q train journey which was crowded, but not as crowded as I really expected it to be. Many passengers had to stand for about 45 minutes as the train made its way through 21 stops. My group made sure I had a seat, for which I was deeply grateful.
It is possible to pre-purchase a photographer’s pass that gets you into the staging area before the parade starts. I had one, along with two other members of the group. We got there too late to use the pass, but it caused us to go where the parade was starting, which was a helpful orientation for me. As you would expect, as street photographers are want to do, the group completely split up and only a few of us ran into each other as the day went on.
This was fascinating to me. It was not fascinating to my fellow workshop participants!
As parades go, it was a perfect parade for me. There were lots of people, but at every point I could get in close enough to get a shot. The parade was not the perfect parade for some of the members of our group who had attended it in previous years. They were deeply disappointed in the lack of the spirit and excitement that had been present in the crowd in previous years. The pandemic has taken its toll in many ways.
Hand helps. Telephone does not.
The goal was to get people shots, i.e., street photography shots, and not place shots, i.e. travel photography shots. From my perspective, it is easier to be a travel photographer, but I have chosen to be a street photographer so I had to press on in the direction of finding interesting moments with people. The other goal was to get figure to ground separation. Now that is a lofty goal in a parade situation. I wanted all of the people in the scene to be physically separated from each other, and not layered over a background element that obscured them. Oh, yes, and there were to be no photographers in the background. I was medium successful in doing that.
If I had stepped just a little to the right, I would have gotten separation between the woman in the front and the woman in green.
Parade participants, and even on lookers, are dressed up, albeit sometimes very scantily. They are ready, willing and able to pose for a picture. Hundreds, even thousands, of photographers are taking street portraits of the costumed mermaids. I had zero interest in that activity.
What I was interested in, but I missed, was the tradition of the parade mermaids entering the water at the end of the parade. It is the signal that the beach season has begun. It was not clear to me when or where that would start. I elected to go home.
I had a great time at the parade. My photographs were medium, but as always, I would like to do it again! See you next year, mermaids.