Rangefinder - November 2012

The result has been highly lauded: Tom
Jimison, curator at the Baldwin Art Gal-
lery at Middle Tennessee State University
exhibited a group of Stein’s photographs
and wrote in an introduction to the exhibit,
“Entering Coney Island through [Harvey’s]
lens is like stepping into another culture, a
fantasyland of the past with an irrepress-
ible optimism about its future. His photo-
graphs are a documentation of a time and
an iconic American place.”
Stein’s emphasis in photography has al-
ways been self-assigned, long-term proj-
ects. Hence, his first book, Parallels: A
Look at Twins (1978, E.P. Dutton), took
six years to photograph (he shot 155 sets
of identical twins throughout the U.S.).
His second book, Artists Observed (1986,
Harry Abrams, Inc.) also took six years
to complete. For that one, Stein photo-
graphed and interviewed 165 visual artists,
including notables such as Andy Warhol,
Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly and
Lee Krasner. His third book, a color volume
about Coney Island (1997, W.W. Norton,
Inc.) was 27 years in the making, and the
one that followed, Movimento: Glimpses of
Italian Street Life (2006, Gangemi Editore),
was completed over a 10-year period.

Lou Jacobs Jr., is the author of 37 how-to photography books, the latest of which is Off-Camera Flash Photography (Amherst Media). He is an industrial designer who became a photographer who became a writer. He is also a former national president of ASMP and has taught photography at UCLA and Brooks Institute. In his spare time he is writing a young adult book titled Teaching Mr. Lincoln to Drive, in which no one takes pictures.