CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/9/2021

'Peter Kayafas: Coney Island Waterdance' is NEW from Purple Martin Press!

Featured photographs are reproduced from Coney Island Waterdance, Purple Martin Press’s infectious new collection of photographs made over two decades—summer and winter—at New York City’s quintessential urban beach by American photographer Peter Kayafas. “I am most interested in the way people look when they don’t know they are being photographed,” Kayafas writes. “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.”