No Tuna -- Mermaid!

Yesterday was the annual Coney Island Mermaid Day Parade. I discovered it by accident the first summer we lived in New York. I was with the kids at the beach when all of a sudden a large group of people in decadent sea creature costumes and a band with a lot of horns and drums playing funky Germanic carnival music from the twenties swarmed over and around us and started dancing in the water while a fat guy dressed like Neptune held up a sign that said “Summer.” I forgot all about the kids and took pictures for the next half hour. Man did I feel bad when I realized I’d lost my children among a bunch of drunken revelers, but I eventually found them splashing around with some girl dressed as a giant lobster with tits for eyes, so all was well. I’ve photographed the Mermaid Day parade ever since.

Usually I take still photos but this year I did video and committed to producing a half hour of television for one of the local public affairs shows. This will be a good test of my incipient video skills. I knew the event, knew what to expect, and knew where people would be, and when. I had a plan for what I wanted to do and executed it as well as I could. Oh, it would have been nice to have a crew and a couple cranes, and some sound people, but I don’t have any of that and am past the point of getting paralyzed by my technological limitations. I just go out and shoot the damned thing, whatever it is, and make of it what I can.

Anyway, we’ll see how it turns out. I logged the video this morning and am capturing it on a different computer as I type. I took a lot of chances creatively and I see clearly all of the things I missed, and the editing will be a chore, but I’m optimistic that I captured the spirit of the event. Whether or not the public affairs show in question shows it or not is another matter since the spirit of the event is decidedly Bacchanalian. Or more to put it more bluntly, there is a lot of T&A.

And that brings me back to the never-ending question of photographic ethics. I genuinely love the Mermaid day parade and believe that it is an important part of the history of Coney Island, of Brooklyn, of New York City, the United States, and the human species, as well as the planet earth and the entire universe. For those humble reasons, I honestly believe that it needs to be captured in pictures so that future generations can know of it and although tI have no doubt that others are doing a bang-up job of capturing the event for posterity, I can’t rely on that belief so must create my own record, for the benefit of mankind. Not that I wouldn’t mind a little personal benefit, but that’s not my primary motivation.

But sadly, photographers are totally fucking it up. The attached picture of the dirty old man snapping a picture of the pretty girl’s ass only begins to tell the story. There are literally hundreds of guys with cameras focusing on women’s tits and asses. I always meet and chat with the parade participants at the beginning before they have felt the barrage of photographers and they are happy optimistic people. By the end they are mostly traumatized. There are a few who love being the center of attention, but for the most part the people who are there one year will not be there the next.

Yet I am one of them. I take hundreds of photographs and for the participants am probably indistinguishable from the perverts. That’s probably not quite true. I am likely distinguishable because I am not skulking around taking pictures of people’s asses, I am in the thick of it, taking pictures of whatever is in front of me, which is often tits and asses. That is the nature of the event and a lot of the people probably think that I’m the worst offender out there.

I don’t know if I can explain it in a convincing manner. I do not see the event with prurient eyes. I see it as beauty, as art. as a kind of life I find eminently satisfying. The beauty I see is in the faces. It’s in the costumes. It’s in the human interaction. Not in the crack of the ass or the curve of the breast. There is not the remotest chance that I am going to masturbate to any of those photos, which is what I imagine most of those guys must do. If I am successful, my eyes will mist over, or I might even shed a tear if I’ve got the proper buzz on, at the human beauty of it all. When I photograph a semi-nude woman, or man, the only sexuality in the image is whatever she or he brings to it. My camera is neutral in that regard.

If you have read this far, you can probably tell that I think a lot about these issues. Last year I was one of the asshole photographers. I consciously planned to be one and I carried it through. I photographed women’s tits and asses as if I cared, as if that’s what I was about, and I genuinely felt like shit. I also photographed the other photographers taking pictures of T&A, as well as the general beauty of the event. And the final product was meant to demonstrate the degeneracy of that kind of photography, but as far as I can tell everyone who saw it missed the point and thought I was just into nudity. What can you do? The photographs have to speak for themselves. I think that there would be people within a wider audience that would appreciate them, but a wider audience is not something I have.

Anyway, I won’t have the bandwidth to put the entire half-hour on line, but I’ll try to carve out a five to ten minute chunk in case anyone is interested. If you’re interested, stay tuned. I like the still photography for what it is, but the movement and sound in the video capture another few layers of reality.