Swimmer, Lido Theater

1986; printed 1990

Using Coney Island as a setting, the photographer John Murphy created tableaux that captured the bleakness of the lives of fictional sideshow and carnival people. Here, a woman straddling a wooden chair faces a painted banner advertising her act at Coney Island’s Lido Theater, which closed in the 1970s. The contrast between her former glory as a performer and her current reality, emphasized by the empty room, is stark.