Photographer Harold Feinstein, the unsung chronicler of Coney Island

Coney Island Teenagers, 1949. ‘Perhaps one of Feinstein’s most iconic photographs,’ says Carrie Scott, curator of Found: A Harold Feinstein Exhibition. ‘He was 18 – not much older than these teenagers – when he shot it.’ Photograph: All photographs by Harold Feinstein

It began with a great outpouring of images. At 15, Harold Feinstein borrowed his neighbour’s Rolleiflex camera and started shooting scenes of everyday life on the streets and boardwalks of south Brooklyn. The year was 1946 and Coney Island, where Feinstein grew up, was still popular with New Yorkers, who flocked to its amusement parks and beaches in the summertime to let their hair down.

Feinstein found compelling dramas wherever he looked: the sergeant in full uniform flirting with an older woman on the boardwalk; the gypsy girl with a dirty face loitering by the carousel. In one shot, a man with a pencil moustache and a “bad luck” tattoo glowers menacingly down at the pint-sized photographer. In another, a cluster of sunbathing teenagers, including a radiantly smiling girl with a radio, bask in the camera’s attention.

His talent was quickly apparent. At 18, Feinstein was accepted into the Photo League, a co-operative of socially conscious New York photographers whose members and supporters included Weegee and Richard Avedon. A year later, he walked into the Museum of Modern Art and presented his work to photography director Edward Steichen, who purchased two prints for the museum’s collection.

Old Couple Seeking Shade, Coney Island, 1948. ‘Feinstein loved the classic composition of this photograph of an elderly couple he frequently saw on the boardwalk. One of his personal favourites taken with his first camera – a Rolleiflex borrowed from a neighbour.’

ver the following decade, Feinstein established himself as an eagle-eyed observer of city life, matching exquisite black-and-white compositions with a rare command of printing – one New York Times review praised the “rich blacks, brilliant middle tones and subdued highlights” in his work. His lens sought out human stories behind the windows of beauty parlours, in smoke-filled diners and on subway trains. As the critic AD Coleman puts it, the resulting images exude “a childlike wonder at the amazing diversity of the city”.

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By the end of the 1950s, however, Feinstein’s photography career was waning. In 1960, as other street chroniclers such as Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus were gaining wider attention, Feinstein left New York for a teaching post in Philadelphia. He continued to take photographs over the ensuing decades, and found unexpected commercial success in 2000 with a book of high-definition scans of flowers, but for half a century his street work was largely forgotten.

In 2011, the British film-maker Andy Dunn noticed a Kickstarter campaign by gallery owner Jason Landry and collector Jim Fitts to fund a hardcover retrospective of Feinstein’s classic black-and-white photography, and duly pledged $50. A year later, when the finished book arrived in the post, he thought: “There’s definitely a film in this.” By the time he tracked Feinstein down and secured an interview, in 2014, the photographer was 83 and ailing. He suffered a heart attack shortly before Dunn was due to visit him at his Massachusetts home, but the interview went ahead, and Dunn was able to hear about the ups and downs of Feinstein’s life first-hand, before the photographer died in 2015.

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