Rob Ball’s Coney Island, published by Dewi Lewis in 2017, returns to a stretch of Brooklyn shoreline that once drew several million visitors a year. Between roughly 1880 and the Second World War it stood as the largest amusement area in the United States; at its peak Luna Park, Dreamland, and Steeplechase Park competed for crowds with ever-newer thrills, and the place became a testing ground for electric light, roller coasters, and even infant incubators. Ball’s subject is not nostalgia alone but the way such a resort rises, declines, and is repaired.

His method sets two registers against each other. Handmade, unpredictable tintypes carry the historical layer—a process once common on Coney Island itself—while colour photographs made during the crowded summer months record the peninsula’s present diversity and popularity. The friction between a slow, singular nineteenth-century medium and the bright, restless contemporary scene is the book’s organising tension.

The project belongs to a longer enquiry by Ball into coastal resorts and their cyclical fortunes, and it follows Dreamlands, his earlier book on Margate’s amusement park. Coney Island, like Margate, has come through years of neglect into a period of repair, and that recent condition is visible in the pictures. Dr. Mark Rawlinson contributes an essay.

For collectors, the appeal lies in this deliberate pairing of process and place: a photographer using a historic technique not as decoration but as argument, and a body of work positioned within a sustained, comparative study of seaside leisure. Ninety-six pages, hardback, 210 by 280 mm.