Coney Island Stories
Liliana Caruana | United States
Photographer: Liliana Caruana
Exhibit Title: Coney Island Stories
Location: United States
Coney Island explores the beach as a shared public space where identity, memory, and self-expression unfold. Drawing from the artist’s experience as an immigrant to Brooklyn, the work observes how individuals inhabit the shoreline through acts of presence—gestures of culture, ritual, and belonging. Together, the photographs form a portrait of a place where differences coexist and are continuously seen.
Coney Island is a deeply personal place for me. It was the beach my family went to when we first immigrated to the United States. We lived in Brooklyn, without a car, and it was the most accessible way to reach the sea. On summer weekends, the beach was crowded beyond imagination—a patchwork of blankets pressed edge to edge, each one inhabited by people from different countries, speaking different languages. This density, this difference, was not a problem. It was simply how the space existed.
As a child, I was fascinated. Sitting blanket to blanket, I listened to unfamiliar languages and watched how people dressed for the beach according to what was permissible within their own cultures. Even then, I sensed that Coney Island was more than a recreational space—it was a place where many worlds met and coexisted.
The crowds have thinned over time, but the diversity remains. People still arrive from many places, bringing their own ways of being into the space. Coney Island is not just a beach; it is a place to be seen. Along the boardwalk and across the sand, individuals present themselves through dress, gesture, ritual, and performance. What unfolds here is a layering of histories, cultures, memories, and identities in a public space.
Each year, the organization Spirits of the Ancestors of the Middle Passage gathers at the beach to honor enslaved Africans brought here through these waters, offering music, dance, and flowers to the ocean. Moments like this exist alongside the everyday—people at rest, in motion, in intimacy, or in quiet acts of self-expression.
What I photograph are these acts of presence—fleeting, vivid gestures that together form a portrait of a place where individuality is continuously performed and witnessed.
Email: LRC11946@ICLOUD.COM
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