amusement park, ocean city, nj
The photo of the week section is always fun for me. I gives me an excuse to go back into my large archive of images and pull out photographs that I have not seen for some time. This image is from Ocean City, NJ and is part of my larger series on amusement parks around the world. The project took me 8 years to complete and covered amusement parks throughout the United States, Europe, and recently Asia. It was a good excuse to have some fun and photograph at the same time. You can see another one of the images from the series in my post, ‘Photographs from my China Trip (Part 1)‘. The idea of the series was not to show loads of happy and excited people on rides. Instead I concentrated more on the graphic elements of the people and the parks. In this image you can see the influence of Ernst Haas. For more on Haas you should read my post, ‘But You Have to See in Photography‘. I wanted to get a good mixture of old amusement parks and new ones to compare the experience. The amusement park series began as a project in my Documentary Photography class in graduate school. We had to pick one subject and work with it the entire semester. For me it was very challenging because normally I do not like to photograph the same place twice. I like to fresh eyes that you bring to a new situation. But for this project, which began with me photographing the 100 years old Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk Amusement park I had to keep going back every week. The first few weeks were tough until I practiced what I termed ‘selective amnesia’. I would just force myself not to think about the images that I had taken previously. I would arrive at the park and start as if I had never been there before. I went during good weather and bad, during the week and on weekends, mostly by myself, but occasionally with a friend. Most times I did not go on the rides, but there were days where I wanted to participate in the amusement park experience just like everyone else. The image above has that nostalgic, romantic look because I began the project using a toy plastic camera called a Holga. This camera produces imperfect images with selective blur and edge vignetting. It really adds character. So this project began on black and white film and then moved over to digital, where I mimicked the look of the Holga camera.
Gary Miller
Houston Fine Art Wedding Photographer
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[...] My stop here was a part of my larger amusement park project. I spoke about it before in ‘Amusement Park – Ocean City, NJ‘ and in ‘Amusement Park – Wildwood, NJ.’ A brief history for those who do [...]
[...] is another in my long going amusement park series. You can read other installments at ‘Amusement Park – Ocean City, NJ‘, ‘Amusement Park Photographs – Wildwood, NJ‘, and ‘A Photograph From [...]
[...] is what led me to begin my amusement park project. You can see images from that in my posts ‘Amusement Park, Ocean City, NJ‘, ‘Amusement Park – Wildwood, NJ‘ and in several [...]