Brighton Beach is a corner of the long beach called Coney Island, Brooklyn. I was born in a Jewish ghetto two years after the Stock Market Crash of ‘29. My parents, born in Manhattan, took up residence there, a kind of permanent vacation, for my mother at least. That explains my fondness for the beach, which I could see from my windows. Long after I left the neighborhood, I decided that was where I ought to photograph. My project lasted twenty years.
I imagine the camera to be like the genie in Alladin’s lamp, a bit malicious. He obeyed the commands of his master alright, but sometimes the outcome was disturbing.
The people there were as if I had invented them; they were going to play the parts of my mother, my brother’s and myself. They were going to take on strange shapes, as I arranged the details to give a sense of truth. I worked for a coherence on a beach which presented an infinite choice of possibilities in order to create a sort of fable, the ultimate sense of which escapes even me. If the discourse is at times ironic, it’s that I undertook it at a fairly late age. I see tenderness and nostalgia, which increased with the passage of time.
I don’t think that I wanted to purge something in myself to undertake this task, but to define myself in these portraits and to impose upon myself the strengths and weaknesses of what we commonly call our humanity. If I had to make up a list of these weaknesses; narcissism, vanity, lust, fear of aging, Don Juanism, uncontrollable appetite, anger, sadness, drug-abuse; vulnerability in all its forms. Still I believe that the unity of this work lies in the desire to live, and there lies their strength.
Someone suggested that I wanted to tear from myself the Jewishness. More likely I wanted to reaffirm it and give me a fuller sense of my own life - a sort of quest for “wisdom” in order to live in the larger world.
In Europe the Jew is and was a preoccupation that has nothing to do with a search for wisdom. The Holocaust, without doubt, caused me to take refuge in my own past, even if my life took me far away from my roots. I could not escape a wound that made me feel that I, too, was not invulnerable. But this work is free from it. It is a matter of how history itself fashioned this flesh and how this flesh is the stage where individual dramas are played out.
-Seymour Jacobs, Paris, 1988