Jeff Mermelstein’s fascination with street photography dates back to 1978, when he moved from New Jersey to New York and became interested in the work of Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, by whom he was briefly taught. Now based in Brooklyn, his images have appeared in publications such as Life, the New Yorker and the New York Times magazine. Since 2015, he has been capturing his surroundings with various models of iPhone – “not necessarily the newest one” – and posting them on Instagram.
“I have used Leicas and Canon SLR cameras for many decades,” he says. “The transition from more conventional, very, very good cameras to smartphone cameras is a departure. It affects how you take pictures, how the camera is held, how you edit work, the immediacy of it. It’s a tool that has enabled me to think differently and, at times, make a picture I didn’t anticipate.”
This photograph, of a goldfish won as a prize at the amusement park on Coney Island, captures a busy summer evening in 2016. Along with 304 other images, it makes up Hardened, a new book edited by writer David Campany collecting Mermelstein’s smartphone photography: grainy, slightly off-kilter images of strange encounters with the city’s inhabitants.
In the four decades he has been in New York, Mermelstein has returned time and time again to Coney Island to take photos. “I like the quite extraordinary mixture of types of people: appearance-wise, clothing-wise or lack of clothing-wise. It’s just a hodgepodge of characters, from the conventional to the bizarre.”
Hardened (£55) by Jeff Mermelstein is published by Mörel Books on 4 November. Find more of his work on Instagram at @jeffmermelstein
